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Books, Culture, Politics and IdeasFri, 09 Dec 2016 14:22:53 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.6Losing Our Headshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/4NnYggtT95c/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/losing-our-heads/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:20:03 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12845Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, famously said that minds are simply what brains do. Minsky’s credo has become a truism; it not only expresses our commitment to a scientific understanding of the mind but also captures the familiar idea that a deep theory can only come from a science of the brain.

It is also a truism, however, that truisms often start out life as controversies, and so it is with Minsky’s. Until recently, in fact, the brain was of little interest to those concerned with mental life. The agenda for the theory of the mind was set by the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, who believed that the mind was a soul that resided apart from the physical world. According to Descartes, then, there could not be a science of the mind, much less a neuroscience of the mind. Theoretical work had to be done to move from Descartes’s view to Minsky’s statement of contemporary common sense, and that work was done in living memory. The idea that the mind is nothing over and above brain activity is credited in part to two expatriate Brits living in Adelaide—the psychologist U.T. Place and the philosopher Jack Smart—who formulated it in the late 1950s. An anecdote makes clear how far from a truism the idea seemed at the time. On a visit to England in the 1950s, a Melbourne philosopher was questioned by a British colleague about what was going on in the Australian philosophy of mind: “What’s happened to Smart?” the man asked. “I hear he is going about saying that the mind is the brain. Do you think it might be the heat?” The Australian is supposed to have replied: “It’s not that hot.”

As with many philosophical doctrines, the mind-brain identity theory, as it came to be called, had antecedents of long standing. The Greek philosopher Democritus held the universe to be made up only of atoms in a void with no conceptual place for anything like a Cartesian soul. Eventually, thinkers in the Democriteantradition gravitated to the brain as the likely organ of thought. Wilhelm Griesinger’s Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, for example—the standard textbook of psychiatry of the 19th century—opens by grounding mental illness in the brain: “What organ must necessarily and invariably be diseased where there is madness? … Physiological and pathological facts show us that this organ can only be the brain.” Griesinger too was echoing ancient Greek antecedents; a Hippocratic text tells us that “from nothing else but thence [the brain] come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations.”

Twenty-first century neuroscience has taken the Hippocratic hypothesis to its logical conclusion. Not only do our joys, delights, sorrows and griefs come from the brain but also our taste in films and music, our political leanings, and our susceptibility to belief or atheism. Indeed, if recent books about the brain—and the inexhaustible media appetite for brain science—are to be believed, neuroscience will provide an account of all of these and much else besides. It will reveal the secret to conquering anxiety, finding love, enhancing memory, getting organized, coping with your rebellious teen, enhancing creativity, understanding gender differences, developing leadership skills, being a better parent and losing weight. At some point in recent history, it seems, a large swath of human life has telescoped into the space of our skulls.

The idea of the brain as the oracle of the mind is not merely hype directed at the book-­buying public. It has been repeatedly claimed that we are at the dawn of a new “neurobiological age,” in the throes of a “neuro-­revolution,” and in the midst of a “neuro-turn”—rhetoric that has fuelled neuroscience since the U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the Decade of the Brain. Reflecting this belief, billions of dollars have been invested in mega projects devoted to mapping, simulating and intervening in the human brain. The scale of the research effort continues to expand. The Obama administration’s BRAIN Initiative, for example, funded mostly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and private research institutes and foundations (such as the Kavli Foundation and the Allen Institute for Brain Science), is comparable in its reach, goals and even surrounding controversy to the European Commission’s $1.3 billion Human Brain Project, which, according its director, will be the “Higgs Boson of the brain.”

Twenty-five years after the inception of the Decade of the Brain, the science of the brain is firmly ensconced at the centre of our search for an understanding of human nature. Neuroscience now occupies something like the place in popular culture once held by psychoanalysis, with the image of the brain scan in place of the picture of the severe Austrian doctor with the cigar. It is appropriate to take stock, and skeptics are beginning to raise questions: Are notions of personhood prematurely being replaced with a reductive “brainhood”? What exactly have we learned about the mind from brain imaging research? What is at stake in reshaping psychiatry and public policy in neuronal terms? And can a successful theory of the mind be exclusively neuroscientific?

By even the most conservative historical accounting, modern neuroscience had existed for more than 60 years by the time Place and Smart published their papers, and a good deal was already known about brain structure and the function of neurons. But it was not until the 1990s that ­scientists at large began to take seriously the idea that a theory of the brain could explain the human mind.

The chief stumbling block in the preceding decades was a principled disinterest in neuroscience that was motivated by another truism, still familiar today, that the mind is a computer. It was frequently remarked that trying to understand it by exploring the brain would be like trying to understand how a computer works by looking at the electrical circuits inside—a hopeless strategy for both computers and minds. A perspicuous characterization of how computers work ignores their physical properties in favour of their logical and mathematical features; a parallel study of the mind, it was argued, would also have to be logical and mathematical. This would be the job of the new discipline known as cognitive science, also invented in the 1950s. The royal road to the mind, according to cognitive scientists, was not the brain but the theory of computation developed by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon’s notion of information and the models of the kind invented by Noam Chomsky to explain grammar. To those at the cutting edge, neuroscientists were the engineers of the mind, not its theorists.

In the 1980s, everything changed. For reasons that still call out for systematic historical investigation, neuroscience became the hot field, and cognitive science was old hat. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, the method par excellence for imaging the brain in action, exploded on the scene in the early 1990s, and there is no doubt that this technology helped the so-called neuro-turn take hold. This year alone, fMRI has been used to explore the neural correlates of social life, empathy, guilt, food, money, sexual attraction, aesthetic beauty and the emotional adolescent. Meditation, too, has become a topic of widespread interest thanks in part to compelling images of brain scans thought to demonstrate the effect of mindfulness on the brains of children, psychiatric patients and Buddhist monks. (Multimillion-dollar projects are now under way funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the United States Department of Education among others.)

The lure of fMRI is, in part, the power of visual information, an idea explored by the anthropologist Joseph Dumit in Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity and more recently by the sociologist Kelly Ann Joyce in Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Brain scans are sometimes raised to the status of self-portraits, charged with emotional significance and imbued with the objective legitimacy of identities and diagnoses.

Nothing like this is justified. Although fMRI tells us a great deal about which parts of the brain support particular mental functions, it only very rarely reveals something new about how the mind works. Moreover, an image from an fMRI scan does not even “reveal” how the brain works per se. fMRI actually tracks oxygenated blood flow to the brain as a proxy for neural activity, and a good deal of (sometimes controversial) statistical analysis goes into inferring what the brain itself is doing. Nevertheless, the scans connote certainty and objectivity, and are therefore, as the psychologist Deena Skolnick Weisberg and her colleagues have demonstrated, often misleading. In a 2008 paper, “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, they report on an experiment in which both neuroscientific experts and non-experts were given descriptions of psychological phenomena, some of which included “scientific-sounding but empirically and conceptually uninformative” neuroscience. The non-expert participants found the explanations that included the irrelevant neuroscience more satisfying than the equivalent explanations without it, which should come as no surprise to readers of bestseller lists.

Contemporary neuroscience is what the brain looks like through a keyhole. It is the science of the brain in isolation. The brain, however, is not isolated; it is situated.

The neuroscience community has begun to evaluate the limitations of fMRI more openly in the face of some recent well-publicized statistical scandals. A paper by Ed Vul and his colleagues (originally called “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience,” then more diplomatically retitled “Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition”) pointed to instances of scientists employing poor methodological standards and overstating their findings. Since then a number of psychologists, neuroscientists and statisticians have challenged the validity of certain neuro-imaging studies. An audience outside of brain imaging labs has been alerted to the fact that these data are difficult to interpret at best and, at worst, meaningless. An article by Anders Eklund, Thomas Nichols and Hans Knutsson published this year in the eminent journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that fMRI “is 25 years old, yet … its most common statistical methods have not been validated using real data.” The weakness of some fMRI methodologies was recently underscored most clearly by a lovely—and now infamous—dead salmon study undertaken by Craig Bennett and his colleagues. Bennett put a salmon in the scanner—“the salmon was … not alive at the time of scanning,” we are told—and exposed it to pictures of human beings in social situations. When a common statistical method for analyzing fMRI data was employed, parts of the fish’s brain appeared to be responding to the images. In case we missed the point, the authors ask: “Could we conclude from this data that the salmon is engaging in the … task? Certainly not.” When the science itself admits of results like this, it seems churlish to profess indignation about popular writing advocating neuro-parenting or brain diets.

This methodological critique of fMRI research is a family quarrel. But the abiding optimism about neuroscience in the face of its shortcomings has begun to raise broader questions about an ideological sea-change. In particular, a number of writers have begun to question the effect of “neuro-centrism” on other sciences of the mind. John C. Markowitz, a clinical psychiatrist writing in the New York Times, recently lamented the fact that, for more than a decade, the National Institute of Mental Health in the United States has favoured neuroscience-related research to such an extent that “clinical research has slowed to a trickle.” He cites a promising study involving treatment for depressed mothers and their children that is unlikely to be replicated because it lacks the “neurosignature” the NIH now prioritizes. It is by no means an anomaly.

Skeptical voices have also been raised against the application of neuroscience to important social practices such as how we treat mental disorders, teach children or determine legal responsibility. The anthropologist Emily Martin has summed up the anxiety about this trend in her lament that this “form of reduction … is likely to impoverish the richness of human social life.” And, in Prospect magazine, the neuroscientist Steven Rose reminds us of the more malign applications of neuroscience in the military, and emphasize the need for more humility in the discipline in light of “a strong neurological determinism that the evidence does not sustain.”

For many neurophiles, of course, the controversies are mostly beside the point. If minds are simply what brains do, then the way to understand the mind must be to understand the brain. What other way could there be? Any failings of contemporary neuroscience are therefore bound to be fleeting. Given enough time, they would argue, a successful neuroscientific theory of the mind is inevitable.

In fact, the inevitability of a neuroscience of the mind is an illusion produced by an attractive philosophical mistake. It is very tempting to think that because the mind is nothing more than the working brain, the science of the mind must be a science of the brain; tempting, but a mistake nonetheless. To see why, think about earthquakes. Earthquakes are nothing more than a very large number of atoms (or quarks or strings; pick your favourite basic particle) moving through complex paths in space and time. Since there is nothing more to earthquakes than moving atoms, a theory of earthquakes is an atomic theory, isn’t it? Not at all. Our best theory of earthquakes is, of course, the theory of plate tectonics, which lumps vast numbers of atoms together into sheets of the earth’s crust called plates and—abstracting away from the individual atoms—models those structures. And (from the point of view of geological outsiders, at any rate) plate tectonics seems to work pretty well—so well, in fact, that we may never need a different kind of theory. Real human science happens to have found a way of understanding earthquakes by thinking about plates. Smaller objects, like atoms, or larger ones, like planets, just do not do the job, at least not for actual human beings at this point in scientific history.

Similar remarks apply to other areas of science. Why is genetics, for instance, a molecular theory? Wouldn’t an atomic theory be more fundamental or more elegant? Wouldn’t a cellular theory be easier to understand? Maybe. Even so, no such theory—if ever it is produced—will catch on simply by virtue of being more fundamental or elegant or easier to understand. Theories stand or fall on how well they explain the domain of interest. Parallel stories could be told about the colour of the sky, the Galápagos tortoises, climate change and just about everything of scientific interest—in fact, the entirety of things of scientific interest outside of fundamental physics itself, all of which are formulated in terms of bigger things than atoms. In short, from the deliciously simple fact that everything is made of atoms, nothing scientifically useful follows. For reasons that are quite mysterious, real science finds the patterns in the universe in different places and at different scales.

What about the mind? Like everything else, the mind is made up of atoms, but so far, no one thinks an atomic theory of mental life is inevitable. Nor should we think that a neuroscientific theory is inevitable. It is still an open question where in the universe we will find a way into the secrets of the mind. Minds are indeed simply what brains do, but which sciences will best explain what brains do is still up for grabs.

As for the argument that neuroscience as a theory of the mind is actually succeeding, this turns out to be largely unsupported by the current evidence. While some excitement about what contribution neuroscience may make to human self-knowledge seems justified, one must bear in mind what we know and what we do not. Fundamental neurobiology—the study of how individual neurons work and how small collections of neurons interact—has deservedly produced quite a few Nobel prizes. The application of neurobiology to human thought, in contrast, is much more speculative and contentious.

If the root of many social problems is inside our own skulls, the solution must lie there too, rather than in robust social programs and thoughtful public policy.

Neuroscience has no theory of human thought of its own—what theory it has is borrowed from cognitive science—and, again, fMRI rarely discovers something about mental function that was not already known from more than a century of modern psychology. Even the application of neuroscience in psychiatry, where it has been most warmly embraced, has failed to deliver the goods. For example, the great achievement of 20th-century neurobiological psychiatry, the “dopamine hypothesis” of schizophrenia—which posited that schizophrenia is caused by overactivity of the neurotransmitter dopamine—was never believed by those most closely associated with it, and has not been borne out by research. And selective serotonin reuptake transmitters, the next generation antidepressants used by millions, appear in effect to be placebos.

Modern neuroscience occupies the proverbial blink of an eye in the history of science. We are decades, or perhaps centuries, away from being able to pass judgement on its success or failure. There is, however, at least one important reason to be doubtful that neuro­science on its own will ever tell us everything we want to know about the human mind. Contemporary neuroscience is what the brain looks like through a keyhole. It is the science of the brain in isolation. The brain, however, is not isolated; it is situated. It lives in an environment—first and foremost, in a body, as well as in a physical, social and cultural milieu—and this environment matters to our understanding of what the brain does. A full description of brain function, therefore, will have to be an expansive one that includes neuroscience as well as a characterization of those features of the world—especially the social world—that matter most to the working brain.

In other contexts, this idea is obvious to the point of banality. How coral grows is a fact about coral, but a scientific theory of coral growth must go hand in hand with a theory of the water in which the coral lives. Lung cancer is a disease of the lungs; no doubt about it. But you should run a mile from any doctor who tells you that the chemistry of cigarette smoke is of no scientific interest because it is external to your organs. Yet the science of the brain’s environment is routinely ignored in neuroscientific research. If neuroscience is going to contribute to the theory of the mind, it is going to have to become a much broader church by extending its hand to the social sciences. Neuroscience may form part of a science of human nature but only if it becomes part of the science of the situated brain.

Schizophrenia, again, provides an apt illustration. A biological disease, schizophrenia appears to be caused in part by genetic processes and abnormalities in brain function. With bipolar disorder, therefore, schizophrenia is the psychiatric phenomenon that is most likely to be understood by neuroscience. As with cancer, however, environmental factors play a role in the etiology of the disease. For example, insults to the brain in utero or drug abuse may contribute to the development of schizophrenia. Surprisingly, the environmental factors we understand best show that we may have to look far afield from neuroscience, to the social world, to fully understand the brain in ­schizophrenia.

Childhood adversity, such as severe abuse or the death of a parent, being an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, and living in a big city roughly double the risk of schizophrenia—an increase comparable to that associated with cannabis abuse. Moreover, these effects seem to be genuinely social, and subtly so. A 2007 study headed by James Kirkbride investigated the incidence of schizophrenia in London neighbourhoods. It found that in more socially cohesive neighbourhoods—marked by greater voter turnout in council elections—schizophrenia was less common. And a 2001 study led by Jane Boydell found that immigrants living in neighbourhoods with other immigrants from the same country were at lower risk of schizophrenia than those living in less homogenous neighbourhoods. Social commitment and support appear to protect against psychosis.

No one knows what exactly it is about social life that interacts with schizophrenia. Obviously, whatever it is must have a downstream effect on the brain that makes it more vulnerable, and a theory of schizophrenia requires that we understand this neural vulnerability. But it is equally obvious that we need to have a theory of the relevant social phenomena. The brain functions in a culture of people, practices and ideas. The science of schizophrenia is therefore as much in need of sociologists and anthropologists as it is of neuroscientists.

The elision of the environment in contemporary neuroscience also has consequences beyond the science. Neuroscientific models of constructs such as illness, responsibility and selfhood continue to be formulated in individualist terms as if people are entirely isolated or stripped of social context or cultural influences. As sociologists such as Nikolas Rose have argued, this is part of a wider moral imperative for health and well-being in the general population to be shifted onto the individual, consistent with descriptions of neoliberal values of self-governance and self-management. If the root of many social problems is inside our own skulls, the solution must lie there too, rather than in robust social programs and thoughtful public policy.

Praise for interdisciplinarity is de rigueur in the academy, and many scientists will agree that an interdisciplinary attack on the mind is a good idea. Unfortunately, between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Interdisciplinarity is by its nature risky, and when money is tight, the healthy scepticism that governs science can become a stifling conservatism. It is to be hoped that when the illusion of inevitability about the future of neuroscience loosens its grip on our thinking, there might be less anxiety about a marriage of neuroscience and social science. Of course, merely putting neuroscience and the social sciences together in a building or in a scientific study will not be enough. Conceptual bridges will have to be built to produce the imaginative engagement that may one day lead to something novel and useful.

There is, finally, some irony in the current disposition to search for a neuroscience of human life inside the skull alone. Evolutionary theory—the central framework of biology—is overwhelmingly concerned with the interaction between organism and environment; neither can be understood in isolation. Strangely, this preoccupation has not yet taken root in the biological study of the brain. As modern neuroscience moves through its second century, we expect it to produce great things. But for neuroscience to fulfill its considerable promise, it must, in the spirit of evolutionary theory, tackle the study of the brain in context. Among the things that 21st century neuroscience is likely to reveal is just how far from the skull one has to go to understand what lies within.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/losing-our-heads/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/losing-our-heads/Blanket Securityhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/_m4NiEo58sQ/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/blanket-security/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:58 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12846On January 30, 2015, just three months after the October 2014 shooting on Parliament Hill and in the wake of the first Paris attack targeting Charlie Hebdo, Prime Minister Stephen Harper introduced Bill C-51. He did so at an election-style rally and not in Parliament. Canada’s anti-terrorism response was—from its inception—politicized, even radicalized, in a way that did not occur even after 9/11.

It is worth remembering that, although many Canadians would later grow disenchanted with its divisive focus on “barbaric cultural practices” and not re-elect the Harper government, the omnibus Bill C-51 was massively popular at first. The Official Opposition, the NDP, took a few weeks before deciding to oppose it. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals voted for it, later promising to repeal its “problematic” aspects.

Once in office, the Liberal government began the process of making good on that promise. This past September, the government issued a 21-page document accompanied by a 73-page background document on national security entitled Our Security, Our Rights: National Security Green Paper, 2016.1 It is designed to facilitate a public consultation to end this month. Legislation is expected sometime in 2017.

The green paper will not be a bestseller, but it makes fascinating reading. In some respects, it is the public defence of Bill C-51 that the Harper government did not provide. It likely reflects the sincere beliefs of many in the national security bureaucracy that they need more powers to perform their difficult jobs. But as the federal privacy commissioner has observed, the green paper “focuses heavily on challenges for law enforcement and national security agencies” as opposed to “democratic rights and privacy.”

Many Canadians may be suffering C-51 fatigue, although they should have been roused from any slumber by the revelations in early November that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service had not been candid to judges about its broad collection and indefinite storage of metadata or identifying information about all those who had contact with any of their targets as far back as 2006. In any event, it is alarming to realize that since Bill C-51 became law in June 2015, CSIS and other security agencies are already using their new powers. There is a danger that C-51 has already become the new normal, to the detriment of both our liberties and our security.

In fact, many of the powers it outlines are already in use. The 2015/16 annual report by CSIS’s review body—the Security Intelligence Review Committee—revealed that CSIS has engaged in about two dozen threat-reduction disruptions since June 2015. Unfortunately, the report provides no details about these activities other than that they were not conducted with a judicial warrant. This means that CSIS and its lawyers determined that the activities did not infringe on laws or Charter rights or cause bodily harm, legal verdicts with which the independent review body agreed.

The concern is that these judgements constitute simply the latest iteration of disturbing post-9/11 phenomena: the proliferation of secret law, in which vague statutes are given secret interpretations kept far from public discussion.

Meanwhile, the privacy commissioner recently reported that the extremely broad information-sharing provisions in C-51 have been used to send and to receive information about 100 times in the first six months of C-51’s operations. At least three agencies (including the Canadian Border Services Agency and Citizenship Canada) that are subject to no dedicated national security review are both sending and receiving information about individuals on the basis that the information falls within Bill C-51’s astonishingly overbroad definition of security threats.

But how good is the information that is being shared? One hopes these agencies have learned lessons from poor information-sharing practices—the sharing of faulty information with international agencies—that contributed to the torture of Maher Arar and other Canadians in Syria. But without effective review and audits we cannot know for sure.

There have been no prosecutions under the new C-51 speech offence of advocating “terrorism offences in general.” But this new C-51 crime was used twice in the last half of 2015 as the basis for a wiretap warrant. To be sure, a judge would have authorized such surveillance. But in a closed hearing with no adversarial challenge, there is no one but the government side represented. Perhaps the warrants have been granted to respond to real threats of terrorist violence, but the C-51 offence as written would allow them to be granted on the basis of speech that could stop well short of instructions or calls to commit actual violence.

The problems in C-51 are many: the law as it stands both overreacts and underreacts. The overreaction makes us less free and the underreaction makes us less safe. Here are some specifics:

1) C-51’s poorly drafted information-sharing law is overbroad in defining security threats (overreaction), but fails to oblige CSIS to share information about possible terrorism offences, even though information sharing between agencies is a blind spot identified by the Air India commission ­(underreaction).

2) CSIS’s new disruption powers, to disrupt or “reduce” all security threats is overbroad by allowing all laws and Charter rights to be breached so long as CSIS does not cause bodily harm, violate sexual integrity or obstruct justice, and the use of those powers is authorized by judges. This is a constitutionally radical and dubious idea (overreaction). At the same time, using these new powers could compromise successful criminal prosecutions of terrorists. CSIS illegalities and Charter violations during the course of investigating a terror plot might lead a court to dismiss charges.

3) Bill C-51’s speech crime applies to anyone who “by communicating statements, knowingly advocates or promotes the commission of terrorism offences in general” infringes on freedom of expression (overreaction). At the same time, no consideration was given to the effect of the speech crime on nascent terrorism prevention programs aimed at dissuading people from violence (underreaction). Those programs require people to voice their perhaps extremist beliefs, which will not happen if saying the wrong thing means risking prosecuting for advocating “terrorism offences in general” and perhaps going to jail for five years.

4) Peace bonds are easier to obtain under C-51, but can create a “Goldilocks” problem: too weak for determined terrorists (underreaction, as compared to actual prosecutions) and too tough when applied to those who have merely expressed extremist or radical views (overreaction).

5) Increased use of secret intelligence to suspend passports and place people on no-fly lists can create false positives (overreactions). At the same time, such sanctions by preventing international travel and terrorism could, as occurred in October 2014, turn would-be foreign terrorists into domestic terrorists (possible ­underreactions).

Aside from these specific concerns, there is an overarching problem with the green paper’s approach to national security.

The green paper examines ten distinct topics sequentially. But the effects of national security activities on both public safety and protection of rights are holistic and cumulative. The green paper examines accountability as a discrete topic, for instance. But accountability and review issues should permeate a discussion of all security ­powers.

At present, our expert review bodies are limited to a handful of agencies and are prevented from conducting joint reviews even as the agencies they review conduct joint operations. The result is a system of accountability gaps, a fact recognized most emphatically by the 2006 Arar commission and noted periodically by review bodies themselves since that time.

The government is moving ahead with a bill (Bill C-22) that will create a special committee of parliamentarians with partial access to secret information. But partial access is not enough to address the accountability challenge. And even with full access, there will always be the need for expert review bodies that can hear complaints and audit in detail operational activities.

A solution—and one supported by international trends—would be to create a “super SIRC,” well staffed and well resourced, that would allow one full-time expert review body to examine all security activities across government—intelligence, information sharing and more—without the need for complicated choreography between existing bodies, or the discretionary appointment of public inquiries like the Arar, Iacobucci and Air India inquiries (which all had whole-of-government mandates). Legislative reform would be required to create this super SIRC, but is nowhere to be found in C-22.

The Australian version of SIRC has a much broader intelligence-based remit than its siloed Canadian counterpart. In the United States, inspectors general for various security agencies can conduct the joint investigations that are necessary to overcome bureaucratic walls between different agencies. Both the United Kingdom and the United States have created new civil liberties boards with government-wide mandates. Canada has fallen behind.

A major area of concern in the status quo before Bill C-51 was the troubled relationship between secret intelligence and public evidence available for use in prosecutions. Consider the findings of the hearing into the 1985 Air India bombing, Canada’s largest mass murder, which unfortunately only resulted in two manslaughter convictions (of the same person). One of its major recommendations was that CSIS be required to share its secret intelligence about terrorism offences with someone able to make decisions in the public interest about whether that intelligence information should be disclosed for use of criminal proceedings.

But instead of following the United Kingdom’s lead—where CSIS’s counterpart now often collects terrorism intelligence to evidentiary standards to minimize “intelligence-to-evidence” issues—C-51 permits information sharing about everything connected with an astoundingly broad range of security threats, but does not require information sharing about terrorism offences. And C-51 left in place Canada’s unwieldy court apparatus for deciding whether secrets should be disclosed in court proceedings.

It is difficult to think of another country that has enacted legislation like Bill C-51 to empower its intelligence agency to violate every law and every constitutional right.

In Canada, only specially designated judges of the Federal Court in Ottawa can decide whether secret intelligence should be shielded from disclosure. The criminal trial judge sitting, say, in Toronto or Montreal must accept Federal Court orders that evidence not be disclosed because it will harm national security. But then the criminal trial judge must decide whether the criminal trial should be stopped because the accused needs the secret material to have a fair trial.

In a case that stemmed from the Toronto 18 prosecutions, the Supreme Court decided that this cumbersome approach was constitutional, while at the same time stressing that it was not pronouncing on the wisdom of the approach that encouraged a form of “constitutional chicken.”

One possible solution? Giving trial judges throughout the country powers to make and revise non-disclosure orders on national security grounds. That would give them more tools, and less blunt ones than terminating trials, to reconcile the competing interests between disclosure and secrecy.

There are other secrecy problems. Bill C-51 restricts the information that security-cleared “special advocates” get in security certificate immigration cases. Special advocates are lawyers who are charged with defending the affected person’s interest in the secret hearings—and their very success in doing so is a likely reason the government sought to roll back their access to information. Their role should be restored, and extended to proceedings challenging no-fly listing, passport revocation and terrorist group ­proscription.

That is only a partial answer to the unfairness of using secret evidence against persons. It is an imperfect proxy, but it would constitute a significant improvement over the status quo.

Bill C-51 has given CSIS new powers to disrupt and even to engage in illegal dirty tricks that violate Charter rights. The 1981 McDonald Commission that preceded the CSIS Act was crystal clear that “noble cause” illegality should not be a feature of Canada’s security intelligence. Parliament resisted a 1983 version of the CSIS bill because of widespread concern, including from all provincial attorneys general, that it would allow CSIS to violate the law as the RCMP had done, most infamously when it burned a barn in Quebec as a disruption tactic.

The Trudeau government’s green paper has a different take from the McDonald Commission—a more hardline one. It argues that the world has changed since 1984 and that when C-51 was enacted “it was felt that there were situations where CSIS was best placed to take timely action to reduce threats.” The paper also argues that allied agencies have threat disruption powers.

It is difficult to think of another country that has enacted legislation like Bill C-51 to empower its intelligence agency to violate every law and every constitutional right, so long as it does not cause bodily harm, invade sexual integrity or intentionally obstruct justice. The United States does not have similar legislation, but one can imagine the new Trump administration would not welcome Canadian legislation restricting CSIS’s powers.

In the United Kingdom, CSIS’s counterpart often works closely with the police when it engages in disruption. In Australia, the disruption powers of the intelligence agency are much more closely defined in legislation than in Canada—such as the power to change data on a computer system. And so even without a codified constitutional bill of rights, Australia’s approach is more transparent and limited than Canada’s C-51 “blank cheque.”

The concern is that the public consultations and legislation to come will not change this blank cheque approach. The green paper repeats the argument made by the previous government that Charter violations could be authorized by judicial warrants, making CSIS’s use of its powers accountable and constitutional. From a constitutional law perspective, this is a perplexing position.

To be sure, judges grant search warrants, but only because section eight of the Charter specifies clearly that Canadians are protected against “unreasonable” searches and seizures. There is no tradition in Canada of limiting other Charter rights by judicial warrants.

In our system, it is Parliament that must take responsibility for placing and justifying reasonable limits on rights. The judicial role is then to determine if legislative limits are justified, not to enable and authorize the violation of rights.

At a minimum, C-51 should be amended to remove any general reference that allows the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to be contravened by a threat reduction measure. If there is a need to limit a particular Charter right, for example the rights of citizens to leave or return to Canada, then that should be specified in the law. In general, the powers that CSIS claims it needs under this section should be more candidly discussed and better articulated in the legislation.

The problems with Bill C-51 are not only matters of legal and constitutional principles. Even if CSIS becomes expert on disrupting terrorist plots, such disruptions will not facilitate terrorist prosecutions. Indeed, they might even taint subsequent attempts to engage in terrorism prosecutions.

The revised protocol between the RCMP and CSIS, called One Vision 2.0, seems aimed at ensuring that CSIS’s new disruption efforts do not also disrupt ongoing criminal investigations. This is a good and necessary start, but we would urge CSIS in its counterterrorism investigations to go further and act in ways that support criminal investigations as its British counterpart, MI5, seems prepared to do. Otherwise, Canada will be drawn into a system of whack-a-mole disruption with no real endgame. Criminal prosecutions are both our fairest and most legitimate response to real terrorist threats.

It is worth remembering that our security agencies are already using the new powers conferred by Bill C-51, and getting used to them. The Trudeau government’s green paperdoes not suggest that those powers will be repealed and it was issued before Trump’s election.

Moreover, the green paper suggests that the state may not stop at C-51. In fact, it signals an interest in new powers especially with respect to digital investigations and access to so-called metadata produced by internet communication, even though the Supreme Court has recognized a privacy interest in analogous information. November’s Federal Court finding about undisclosed and broad CSIS retention of metadata since 2006 has understandably heightened concerns. Increased access to our digital trails will invade privacy. And that invasion can then be multiplied by C-51’s overbroad information-­sharing laws while not being checked by adequate and full-time independent review that can follow the intelligence trail wherever it leads.

It may be that alternatives to the criminal law bolstered in C-51 such as peace bonds and no-fly listings appear to offer a chance to “scare straight” potential security threats. But in truth, all offer less viable and less legitimate solutions than successful criminal prosecutions when the real threat of terrorist violence presents itself.

In sum, C-51 was a cacophony of tactics whose full use would undermine civil liberties without necessarily making us safer. A long list of tactics will never compensate for a strategy. And it will not compensate for effective terrorism prosecutions. In addition, there is need for a better review of our counterterrorism efforts to guard against the constant dangers of overreacting or underreacting to the real threat of terrorism. Canada can do
better.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/blanket-security/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/blanket-security/Should Fort Mac Still Exist?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/GhPoqZkrrJo/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/should-fort-mac-still-exist/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:53 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12844As a reporter covering the Fort McMurray wildfire—“The Beast,” as it would come to be known—I met dozens of people fleeing the disaster, each with a heart-­rending story. A soft-spoken young dad, an immigrant from the Philippines, had doused his boys’ heads with water and begged for Jesus in Tagalog as ten-metre walls of flames licked at their car. There was a hardened woman in her fifties, an oil worker with decades on the patch, whose truck was running on fumes by the time she got to a whistle stop south of Fort Mac. But it is Sarah Davies’s story that still haunts me. Hours earlier she had escaped Fort Mac in socks, running toward the flames as she tried to escape them. She was still dressed in the baggy blue t-shirt she had worn as she watched the fire swallow her home. Only the cement foundation survived. More than anything, she just wanted to get home.

When she did finally return to Fort Mac this July, to that spot, surrounded by charred bikes and SUVs—some of it still covered in the white silica foam meant to keep ash from floating downtown—she told me she wished she could be almost anywhere else. In her case, the old adage about homecoming has been turned on its head: not only can she go home again, it is in fact the only place she can go.

Davies’s decision to stay is not driven by a sense of nostalgic attachment, or career prospects; she has not been able to return to work, and it took her partner months to find a job. Rather, what brought them back to Fort McMurray, and keeps them there, is the peculiar economics of rebuilding after disaster.

Most of the world watching the fires saw the disaster on a human scale: the individuals who escaped clutching a teddy bear, a cherished grandparent’s letter. But the fire’s aftermath is unfolding on a scale that seems anything but human. The insurance bill alone for the ice storms of 1998 came in at $1.9 billion in today’s dollars. The Alberta floods of 2013 caused $1.7 billion in insured property damage. Estimates for the wildfire run as high as four times that. Canada has never seen anything like it.

Sarah Davies’s entire neighbourhood of Waterways was lost. So was Beacon Hill. Half of Abasand is gone. In all, 2,400 structures in the city were levelled, totalling ten percent of the northern oil capital. Over the next couple of years, insurers are expected to pump $4.6 billion into northern Alberta’s economy, the first real sign of life since oil crashed two years ago.

Reports of this infusion of money and jobs have been met with excitement, and understandably; it is a bit of good news for a province that has not seen much of it. (“Our last boom,” the wry joke goes.) But in the rush to rebuild, it seems many key questions are being ignored. Do people like Sarah Davies want to go home? Does it make sense to rebuild a town that people were beginning to leave even before the fire? Should Fort McMurray continue to exist exactly as it did two years ago, before being pummelled by back-to-back disasters?

In a sense, Fort Mac, unusually for any city, has the opportunity for the second time in its lifetime, to start fresh. Although a town of some kind has existed at the confluence of the Athabasca and Clearwater rivers since Cree and Dene traders used the site to offload beaver, much of Fort McMurray sprung up in the last decade and a half, with the boom in full swing. Thanks to new technologies—and royalty deals—Alberta’s oil sands began producing a million barrels a day by 2004, up from 30,000 in the 1980s. As more and bigger megaprojects broke ground, economic migrants fleeing the Philippines, Ethiopia, Pakistan, northern Ontario, the British Columbia interior and, especially, Atlantic Canada grew the local population to 90,000. They worked twelve-hour shifts earning “double-double overtime pay”: twice the wages and pension deposits. The median age was just 31.

For better and for worse, Fort Mac was the city that $150-a-barrel oil built, almost overnight. Newcomers dubbed the place Fort Make Money and, later, Fort Crack. Almost half the town’s residents were earning more than $100,000 a year, ﬁve times the national average. Infused with the kind of per capita cash that cities like Toronto and Halifax can only dream of, the Rural Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray opened the North’s best airport. A footbridge linking MacDonald Island to the downtown, as well as a new marina, riverwalk and mixed-used condo development, are still in the works.

All of this helps deflect from Fort Mac’s more notable missteps:the low-density, ticky-tacky suburbs it allowed to sprout whole in the last decade, ignoring all the hard-earned lessons of urban planning that cities to the south are desperately trying to correct.

Now, the twin misfortunes of the oil bust and the fires present an opportunity: to build smarter. To make Fort Mac denser, greener, more livable, less prone to bottling up with traffic jams rivalling Vancouver’s. To infill, to mitigate against future disasters by avoiding building on forested land and flood plains. To design a more imaginative, coherent city that does not just replicate the sprawl of cities that grew in fits and starts, extemporaneously, over a century or two.And, of course, to do it all while falling oil prices are top of mind. If anyone can pull it off, it should be the northern burg with a population the size of Sarnia’s that imported its design team from Europe, and put together an expenditures budget just shy of Saskatchewan’s. It should be Canada’s youngest, richest community.

But in order to rebuild intelligently, government and business leaders as well as public stakeholders need to have a more fundamental conversation, about how and where to rebuild Fort McMurray. Does it make sense to pump billions of dollars into a resource town that is faced with a declining resource economy? By January of this year, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers was reporting some 35,000 oil patch jobs lost due over the year thanks to the slump in oil prices, and the Canadian Real Estate Association announced that housing sales in Fort Mac were down 44 percent from the year prior, with more than $100,000 trimmed from the average selling price of a single, detached home. A rebuilding plan for Fort McMurray should surely include conversations about the city’s long-term economic prospects, its sharply reduced growth projections of the city’s population ten or 20 years hence, and more radical ideas such as redrawing the city’s borders to account for reverse economic migrations, away from Fort Mac to account for them.

And yet, for now, the city is allowing little more than insurance rules to dictate the vision. Home insurance policies are designed such that, if homeowners rebuild on their old lots, insurers will replace their homes at full value. Most homeowners are also offered a discounted cash buyout—say, $300,000 for a home that might cost $400,000 to rebuild. But, for those with a mortgaged property and, say, $400,000 still owing to the bank, a buyout is not a pragmatic option. So they are rebuilding.

Canadians are willing to put such questions to indigenous communities in the wake of crisis. Relocation has become non-indigenous Canada’s go-to solution to every on-reserve emergency.

Construction has even rolled ahead in those parts of Waterways, Sarah Davies’s neighbourhood, that are sitting on a flood plain, even though this is barred by pending provincial law (part of provincial flood zone restrictions tabled in response to the 2013 floods, the worst Canada has ever seen). Wood Buffalo left that critical decision up to Waterways residents themselves, by surveying them. When a majority—surprising no one—chose to rebuild exactly where they were before, the municipality passed a bylaw allowing it. James Pomeroy, one of Canada’s top hydrologists, blamed the decision on a lack of “political will.”

An insurance industry insider who has spent considerable time in the region since the fire says the industry has even got together and informally agreed to waive “same-site requirements” for Waterways residents. That is, insurers, not government, were prepared to foot the bill to rebuild flood-prone homes at full value on higher ground. He says the municipality was well aware of the offer, yet still chose not to take it. It is hard to imagine anything but politics driving such a decision. Many residents had made it clear they wanted to stay, and so, even with the prospect of having the costs covered of rebuilding elsewhere, council appeared to take the less politically messy option. (It may have been particularly bad timing for it to pursue an unpopular idea, given council’s summer decision to double the pay of councillors to compensate for the increased post-fire workload. The move made Wood Buffalo’s councillors among the country’s highest paid, and was met locally by howling ­outrage.)

Nor is Waterways the only neighbourhood facing such tough decisions. Debates over rebuilding versus relocating should have been held more thoroughly across Fort Mac. Canadians are, after all, willing to put such questions to indigenous communities in the wake of crisis. Relocation has become non-indigenous Canada’s go-to solution to every on-reserve emergency, from the school shootings at Lac La Loche in northern Saskatchewan to the suicide epidemic at Attawapiskat in northwest Ontario, to the unemployment crisis at Kashechewan on James Bay. The absence of a sustaining economic basis for a community, specifically, is often cited as a reason to relocate reserve populations. Those are communities that are old and established with deep and cohesive cultural roots and ties to the land. Fort Mac, on the other hand, is composed largely of an itinerant, migrant community that is a decade or so old—and some of its residents were already considering moving on. Given the number of transplanted Newfoundlanders around the oil patch, many McMurrayites would also be familiar with the approach. Five fading Newfoundland fishing villages have requested relocation. According to provincial legislation, residents would be paid $270,000 apiece to resettle to larger centres, saving taxpayers millions by allowing St. John’s to pull the plug on disused ferries, diesel shipments and other services.

There is another argument for a more rational approach. When it comes to rebuilding neighbourhoods flattened by fire, the hefty costs associated with re-establishing services—repairing damaged roads, sidewalks and infrastructure—should be a serious concern. At this critical juncture, it seems fair to ask whether this is what Fort Mac wants, or needs—and whether the town might not be better off buying out residents of burnt-out neighbourhoods or offering land swaps, either inside town or elsewhere in the province. In many cases they might pain those still reeling from the disaster. The prospect of uprooting might be unimaginable for some. But the question remains of whether we are in another boom-and-bust cycle for oil prices or whether this is the last gasp of the fossil fuel age, and a harsher economic reality may well force the question if thoughtful and responsible decision makers do not.

Earlier this fall, Melissa Blake, the popular, four-term mayor of Wood Buffalo,announced she would not run in next October’s election. There have been reports and rumours of internecine squabbling as her part-time council, made up of vice-principals, realtors, construction workers and radio reporters—who were once used to green-lighting new roads and community centres—faced the Herculean task of remaking a city. That effort has hanging over it not the glow of opportunity, but its ghosts.

Two years of plummeting oil prices have sent the Alberta economy into freefall. In the months leading up to the fire, a lot of McMurrayites were kept awake at night by fears of losing their jobs and their homes, and of being forced to flee the tanking economy. Eight days before the fire, officially known as MWF-009, began on the Horse River trails south of Abasand, Alister Cowan, the CFO of Suncor, Canada’s largest energy producer, admitted Fort McMurray will never again see the megaprojects that had turbo-charged the national economy. “The years of large, multibillion-dollar projects are probably gone,” Cowan told an audience of oil insiders. On that day, some 700 Fort Mac homes were on the market. That is, four percent of the city had already made the decision to pack up and go.

In a world glutted by oil, Alberta’s marginal output no longer makes economic sense. This summer, Saudi oil set an output record, pumping eleven million barrels a day through July, and Iran is ramping up toward pre-sanction production levels. And while OPEC members are discussing a plan to reduce output, in the last decade the United States has doubled its oil output, part of the so-called shale revolution.

In the time since the rout began, the oil industry has cancelled projects totalling tens of billions of dollars. Within four years, construction jobs could be cut by 84 percent, according to one report. With a $47 barrel, we appear to be coming up on the first year in two decades without a construction start in the patch.

Six months on, residents of Fort Mac say the camaraderie, toughness and optimism that united them after the fires rolled out have been replaced by an undercurrent of anger. Those who lost homes are frustrated, impatient. The timid civic planning and the reluctance of municipal and provincial leaders to wade into less politically expedient solutions has not left them with a clear and easy path. They are fighting with insurance companies, fighting with Wood Buffalo over the cost of demolition permits, building permits, new fees for soil disposal and the mishmash of regulations that can change on a dime. McMurrayites do not know whether to stay or walk away and repay their debts in a place with a less shaky future. They are anxious, some of them still suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. One woman I know has been crippled by it. Another has not come home yet from Morinville, north of Edmonton; she says she starts shaking and crying whenever she points her car north on Highway 63.

Amid all this, the question here no one seems yet ready to face, not lawmakers, not planners, not residents, is what life in Fort Mac will look like after this last hurrah, when the rebuilding projects wind down and the boomtown begins a slow fade. The opportunity to address itstill exists, but it will not for long.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/should-fort-mac-still-exist/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/should-fort-mac-still-exist/Text and the Single Guyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/WmIZyvGFU1g/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/text-and-the-single-guy/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:46 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12848Although well thumbed, our sturdiest blueprint for the coming-of-age form of storytelling remains the Telemachy, the first four books of Homer’s Odyssey wherein Telemachus, son of Odysseus, rages against his mother’s suitors and, with Athena’s urging and assistance, hikes off in search of some trace of his father. Telemachus’s identity is forged in the furnace of his belief that his father remains alive. In the countless iterations of that tale undertaken since, art has frequently provided a character’s map from childhood to maturity, and it is to that art-obsessed subgenre of bildungsroman that Devon Code’s debut novel, Involuntary Bliss, belongs. Like Theo Decker in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, who totes a painting through his life as both key and memento, the unnamed narrator of Code’s novel elevates art to a central position, relying on it to explain, to console and to express, although it does not necessarily express what he means it to.

In “The White Knight,” a short story from Code’s 2007 collection, In a Mist, a character named Frank Rinehardt devotes himself to the study of the films of Humphrey Bogart. Of Casablanca, Frank says, “it occurred to me that if I could make sense of the film in a way in which no one had managed to do before, I might imbue my own life with a sense of purpose it seemed to lack.” As time progresses, it becomes clear that Frank’s intellectual questing has become a spiritual thirst; he connects dots apparent only to him, eventually linking Bogart to a deep reading of the nearly cosmic significance of chess. “I am a believer,” he concludes. In “Alice and Roy,” from the same collection, characters are brought together by their appreciation of an obscure jazz singer, their letters to Down Beat magazine and their attempts to revive the singer’s reputation. Throughout Code’s work, characters—usually young males—latch onto codices, texts or cultural relics out of the past in order to graft some measure of meaning onto their lives. They go in search of designs for living and often find them in unusual places. It might be chess, or music, or, as in the case of Code’s 2010 Journey Prize–winning story, “Uncle Oscar,” croquet. His characters are in search of totems as well as shibboleths—that is, proof of their own identity—and a means of locating others who share their beliefs.

This remains true in Involuntary Bliss, which features a trio of young men bound by an obsession with an esoteric text they refer to only as “the Peruvian novella.” The plot is light. University classmates in the subject of “Cyclopean Studies” form a bond, one of their number dies tragically, the others stumble about attempting to make sense of things, women are wooed and lost, passage is booked to Machu Picchu, and it all leads, as these things inescapably do, to an ayahuasca experience. This is not a book much concerned with plot; it is a dialogue narrated by an intermediary—a book, above all, about ideas. It functions simultaneously as a bildungsroman and as a heady, talk-heavy philosophical novel, the trick being that the ideas and philosophies worried over by Code’s characters are ultimately nonsensical. Code is not interested in the ideas that fuse these young men’s identities, forging them into something built to withstand the rest of their lives, but in the zeal with which they adopt and cling to them, as well as the connections made, and unmade, thereby.

Since Code mentions Casa­blanca, let’s talk about McGuffins, those objects or goals that serve only to drive a story forward. Hitchcock used the term, and so, too, does Frank Rinehardt in “The White Knight,” identifying Casablanca’s McGuffin as the transit papers that will ensure their bearer safe passage to Lisbon. In Involuntary Bliss, the Peruvian novella fills the role, binding and motivating the three young men, although its contents remain mysterious to the reader. In Code’s hand, this enigmatic text is malleable and fantastical enough to allow him access to what he is really interested in: not the particulars of a belief system, but the processes and pathology of his characters’ near-fanatical belief.

Given that this is a story of following and not of leading, Code’s narrator is not the mouth from which we hear most of Involuntary Bliss’s story. He is merely the set of ears through which it is transmitted. These ideas, therefore, are in a way secondhand. It is James, friend and former classmate of the narrator, who relays most of the action over the course of a weekend in Montreal, where he has come to cobble together a new life in the wake of the tragic death of Warren, the third of the young men for whom the Peruvian novella constitutes something of a sacred text.

Involuntary Bliss displays the influence of Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald’s 2001 novel of history and identity, in which an unnamed narrator provides the true central character, Austerlitz, with someone they can tell their story. In the telling, Austerlitz, like James, is prone to dense blocks of thought, which translate into long paragraphs sometimes spanning several pages. These passages meander because Austerlitz is engaged in a complex process: assembling an identity that, through a complicated family history, has eluded him. His effort requires both discovery and invention, digging through archives as well as following his own interests in an attempt to piece together something whole. We make ourselves in part, suggests Austerlitz, from ideas. The novel, the events of which occur over several decades, amounts to the title character puzzling aloud to his friend about his travels and his fragmented personal history. He combines artifact and invention to achieve a bricolage identity.

The density of sentence and paragraph in Code’s novel also arises from a different need: play. Code’s most acrobatic prose comes in the service of describing systems of belief: the more outrageous or surreal, the better. Infants are the perfect revolutionaries; exotic dancers’ breasts are receptors and transmitters of “dynamic impressions”; Québécois art is misrepresented by the covetous attention directed toward bad Québécois artists by New Jerseyans with poor taste; the imminent arrival of the Four Horsemen is signified by societal symptoms such as “the hegemony of arborescent thinking.” In such passages, Code is at his most inspired and playful, laying bare an assertion that systems of belief are flawed, good for nothing so much as making zealots and fools out of the young. But he is also not above casting a fond eye back toward that period in life. Being misguided, he suggests, never felt so good.

In the late 1980s, into the cauldron of what was dubbed, for want of a better term, the post-­hardcore music scene of Washington DC, there arrived a group called the Nation of Ulysses. Their music was as abrasive as it was thrilling, a mash of noise-punk and free jazz. Onstage they presented a unified front, a phalanx of young men in black suits, shined brogues and pomaded hair, inexpertly bashing their instruments while shouting slogans, reciting manifestos between songs. Their first album was called 13-Point Program to Destroy America. Their desire was to provoke, and to do so they borrowed from Futurism, avant-garde jazz, French philosophy, Black Pantherism and Detroit’s proto-punk musical agitators MC5. The result was theatre: a series of three-minute love letters to movements, but not any particular movement. They paid tribute to the romance of the revolutionary ethos, the fury of young people discovering such belief systems and putting them to use in the creation of identity. When it came to specifics, the Nation of Ulysses refused to be pinned down, but that never seemed to matter. The energy was what inspired them, and that energy was what they effectively expressed.

That same energy is brought to mind by Code’s slim novel, the power that a Celestine Prophecy–like, quasi-holy text can exert over young men who willingly prostrate themselves before it, acting and feeling with the searing urgency of Goethe’s Werther. There are moments in Involuntary Bliss when readers may find themselves frustrated by Code’s unwillingness to divulge particulars, but reality could never reach the levels of absurdity cooked up in the young men’s brains—disclosing the actual contents of the novella, for instance, would have imposed a too-precise specificity, thereby ruining the illusion. Instead, he gives us the contact high; his characters’ mania is the real point, not the details. By dodging those specifics, Code has written a novel not about belief systems, but about believers; not about the dots, but about those who would define themselves by the fervour of their efforts to connect them.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/text-and-the-single-guy/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/text-and-the-single-guy/Dancing Around the Pointhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/deOSB2AluPI/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/dancing-around-the-point/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:40 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12850Haruki Murakami is a prolific and distinguished novelist; Seiji Ozawa is an internationally renowned orchestral conductor. In December 2009, Ozawa was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and in the ensuing months, while receiving treatments, he underwent a back operation. During his difficult but successful recuperation and the modified return to professional commitments that followed, he and his friend Murakami hit on the idea of recording the frequent informal talks about music they had been enjoying, and transcribing the results as a book. Murakami makes no claim to “inside” music knowledge, but is an avid music lover and cherishes a large collection of musical recordings. The conversations, which took place during the period of Ozawa’s recovery, from November 2010 to July 2011, at various locales (Japan, Hawaii, Switzerland), therefore use a non-technical vocabulary.

What is music, what does it do, and how does it do it? The English Bach scholar, harpsichordist and organist Peter Williams, who died in February of this year, liked to pose, and attempt answering, these questions. Music’s essence, as an ephemeral, intangible phenomenon, has always been hard to deal with in words. The changing definitions of music and methods of musical consumption in recent decades have not made it any easier. Today, a pocket device may contain thousands of examples of recorded music from whole Beethoven quartets and whole Wagner operas to excerpts from Hamilton, each one referred to as a “song.”

A pianist “slows his phrasing way down”—but the musical term “phrasing” does not relate to fast or slow speed of performance (the word for that is tempo).

Absolutely on Music: Conversations is not a book for music lovers in the traditional sense. It is more a book for record collectors. “On music” is a misleading term for a title; it is more like “on performance.” The talks are mostly not about what the music is like (what it does) but about how performers treat it. Much space is given to comparing sounds—the “harsh edge” of the New York Philharmonic in general versus its “gliding along” character in one recorded performance, or versus the “milder sound” of the Boston Symphony or the “German sound” of the Berlin Philharmonic; or Ozawa’s recording of the Mahler First Symphony alongside that of Bruno Walter (“the sound is so different”)—­language that fails to convey anything very specific if music is the subject. The phrase “the music itself” occurs seldom in these conversations. As if sensing this shortcoming, Murakami makes parenthetical comments on their talks that sometimes offer a link to musical values. A lengthy comparison of two different takes of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony helpfully connects the performing differences with the special nature of the passage being performed, namely the suspenseful buildup to the main theme: as the author notes, “the sound carries with it an important part of Brahms’s internal spiritual world.”

Speaking of the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which meets briefly once a year, Murakami comments that it still nonetheless “seems to have a certain consistency to its sound.” Ozawa agrees, and adds, “it’s an orchestra that strongly foregrounds the strings.” The reader tries to imagine how an orchestra would do that: by suppressing the clarinet solos or trombone chords in favour of whatever the composer has written for the strings, be it foreground or background? This may be a problem of translation: it would make sense to remark that the orchestra was noted for the strength or solidity of its string ­section.

Likewise, a pianist “slows his phrasing way down”—but the musical term “phrasing” does not relate to fast or slow speed of performance (the word for that is tempo). “His action or touch or whatever you call it was just a bit slower than it used to be”: the terms “action” and “touch” have musical meaning, but again are not concerned with tempo. In such passages (and they are frequent) one gets only a vague sense of what musical quality is being commented on.

Not that commentary on music cannot be successfully addressed to lay listeners or even by lay listeners. A still-remembered New York critic, B.H. Haggin, once wrote Music for the ManWho Enjoys “Hamlet,” illustrating his text by references to LP recordings, with particular passages indicated by distance in inches along the disc as it plays. (Instead of distance measurements, Murakami uses indications of time, in minutes and seconds, in order to locate, for the reader, the specific recorded passages referred to in the conversations. If you do not have the recordings handy, a note at the end of the text tells you a “selection” is available on the author’s website.) In the preface to a collection of his writings (Music Observed), Haggin described his approach to listening as trying to distinguish between “the playing of the instrument and the playing of the music.”

A brilliant and knowledgeable current critic, Alex Ross of The New Yorker is exceptionally adept at conveying musical characteristics to non-­specialist readers. In The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, he evokes Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony: “A brassy blast of D minor shoves us into the finale. The change is so wrenching that listeners may learn to dread its arrival. The pivotal notes D and A, which sounded pensively in the first movement, now thunder in the drums.” Or Act Two of Britten’s opera Peter Grimes: “in the middle of the D-major festivities a B-flat-major triad sounds low in the orchestra, creating a sudden, jarring dissonance.” Even if his public is a broad and general one, Ross is not afraid of mildly technical elements such as keys, notes or the important concepts of consonance and dissonance.

To exemplify intelligent and gripping writing about music by a lay listener, one may recall Brandy of the Damned—the title is a wry definition of music by Bernard Shaw, from his youthful stint as a music critic—a fascinating collection by the English writer Colin Wilson. Speaking of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony, Wilson writes: “anyone who knows Billy the Kid quickly recognizes the Copland fingerprint in the opening bars—those remote sounding woodwinds suggesting night on the open prairie, that slightly Vaughan Williamsy melody which is nevertheless characteristically American.” These words may demand a certain experience, a certain listening background, but they aim to evoke the flavour of the music, rather than a manner of performing it.

Absolutely on Music was born when Ozawa and Murakami discussed the 1962 performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, with Glenn Gould as soloist. This is the famous occasion when Gould insisted on playing the solo part with radically revised tempi and Bernstein made a short speech declaring that he would conduct out of respect for Gould although he disagreed. “Such a fascinating story”—“a shame … to let … [it] just evaporate,” Murakami says. Far from evaporating, the story is well known from every book about Gould. But this retelling has a fresh angle: in 1962 Ozawa was Bernstein’s apprentice and, because of the clash of views between conductor and soloist, he got to conduct a recording session of the Concerto (which was never released, although an aircheck of the live performance was).

This lengthy chat introduces Ozawa’s memories of Gould’s recording of the Third Concerto by Beethoven; he and Murakami then compare other recordings of that work, among them one by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and others that Ozawa himself conducted. As they listen to one performance and then another, exchanging comments, the reader realizes that they are conversing while the music is playing—without either participant ever interrupting with “shh, let’s just listen.” Adding up the lengths of recorded illustrations mentioned in this “First Conversation” (64 pages), one imagines their taped dialogue took something over five hours. Even longer would be the 82-page discussion “On the Music of Gustav Mahler” (headed “Fourth Conversation”), with its many references to recorded examples from (mainly) the Mahler symphonies. Again, the musical examples are observed (in talk-over) by their performing minutiae, not their musical features:

Oz: This part is very mild, too, isn’t it?
Mur: The sound is unified, and the quality of the playing is high.
Oz: Yes, but it could use a little more flavor.
Mur: I think it’s expressive, and it really sings.
Oz: But it’s missing a certain heaviness—a feeling from the countryside.
Mur: You mean it’s too clean and neat?

Such passages are frequent in the book, and they suggest that Murakami and Ozawa underestimate the ability of non-professional music lovers to understand the occasional term (“tempo,” “dissonance”) from the vocabulary of “the music itself.” It is also possible the apparent dumbing down is the translator’s fault rather than theirs.

The several mentions of Canadian musical events and personalities will please Canadian readers, especially older aficionados who recall vividly the strong influence Ozawa exerted during his short tenure (1965–69) as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The mentions are sometimes vague or unintentionally belittling: the TSO was a young orchestra (meaning inexperienced?); Massey Hall was famous for its poor acoustics (were they that bad?). Ozawa had discovered Mahler during his time in New York with Bernstein, and, arriving in Toronto, he acted as a “pioneer” giving performances of the “little known” Bruckner and Mahler ­repertoire. The 1950s and early ’60s were a period when Toronto had three professional orchestras, the TSO, the CBC Symphony and the York Concert Society, with a considerable overlap in membership. Since it was before his time, Ozawa may be forgiven for believing that the music of Bruckner and Mahler was as unknown in Toronto as he makes out. It was a specialty of Heinz Unger, with his York group and sometimes with the CBC.

Ozawa made a striking emphasis on 20th-century repertoire during his tenure with the TSO, programming pieces not heard before in Canada by Ligeti, Takemitsu, Messiaen and others. New music has remained one of his special interests and skills throughout his career, but perhaps that interest is not shared by Mura­kami. However, there are several mentions of their shared fondness for jazz and of jazz performances they have enjoyed together. In general, the conversations concentrate on the European classics.

Ozawa turned 80 last year, and conducted in Germany and at his annual string institute in Switzerland. In May 2016 he was obliged to withdraw from scheduled appearances at the Tanglewood Festival owing to ill health, although later in the year he conducted at a festival in Japan.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/dancing-around-the-point/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/dancing-around-the-point/Good Mother, Bad Motherhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/QQBGftEn-YA/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/good-mother-bad-mother/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:36 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12851Before I had children, I wondered if I could ever love a child as much as I adored my cat. Absurd, I know, but I remembered that embarrassingly naive attitude in reading The Wonder because the power of the mother-child bond is a motivating force in Emma Donoghue’s fiction. Yet, here is the twist: the Irish-Canadian writer is not interested in conventional takes in which Mamma falls desperately in love with baby.

In her recent novels, Room, Frog Music and The Wonder (which was shortlisted for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller prize), Donoghue presents alternative visions of motherhood. Herself the mother of two children raised in a same-sex relationship, Donoghue believes the mother-child bond is complicated and nuanced. She twirls Wordsworth’s aphorism “the child is father to the man” into a feminist meme, showing us that mother and child, however they come together, are equal participants in a pairing that requires loving and transparent hearts more than biological ­connections.

Donoghue entices us through the narrative lure of criminal activity and uses her prodigious research skills and cinematic vision to create fast-paced novels set in different eras and locations while retaining their common theme. Her 2010 breakthrough book, Room, which was set in the here and now on the eastern shores of the United States, was ostensibly the gruesome story of a sex slave, her captor and the unwanted child fathered by a rapist and kidnapper. In fact, it was a meditation on how a mother-child relationship that begins in horror can become redemptive.

Frog Music, which followed in 2014, takes place over three days in San Francisco in 1876 during an inferno of heat and contagion as the temperature soars and a smallpox epidemic rages. Who shot Jenny Bonnet, a cross-dressing frog catcher, as she lay sexually sated in a bedroom she shared with a French burlesque dancer and prostitute named Blanche Beunon? And who stole Blanche’s baby, the unwanted and neglected child she sent to a baby farm, and then retrieved?

Like Room, Frog Music is positioned as a crime story. Really, though, it is about how women are exploited in the sex trade, how lesbians suffer from prejudice and how maternal traits can be roused from a slough of indifference. Violence in Donoghue’s fiction invariably occurs off page, leaving us to imagine the damage that cruel characters (often, but not always male) can inflict on defenceless children.

Anna, a clever, charming and pious girl, is not an ordinary patient. She is anorexic, having refused to eat food since her confirmation, which was celebrated on her eleventh birthday.

These are the same issues that Donoghue brings to The Wonder, her strongest attack on the presumption that the nuclear family is the ideal parenting model.

She plunks us down in Ireland, in 1859, the middle of the Victorian era, as British imperialism is approaching its global crescendo. The story, which was inspired by diverse accounts of “Fasting Girls” over the past four centuries, is a simple one about a poor Irish couple named O’Donnell and their children, Patrick (Pat) and Anna. Donoghue tells it well, pitting the family’s abiding religious faith and superstitious belief in fairies against the medical knowledge and scientific training of Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, a British nurse who has been sent across the Irish Sea to discover how (not why) Anna O’Donnell has survived for four months without appearing to eat.

Wright knows about starvation. Her only child died as a newborn after refusing to suckle at her breast. Afterward, Wright trained as a nurse and became a “Nightingale,” working under the legendary “lady of the lamp” caring for wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War, a savage international conflict sparked by religious intolerance and territorial aggression.

As a nurse, Wright has “failed to find her niche” half a decade after the hostilities ended, and is thus “sufficiently at loose ends to take the poisoned bait” of a private nursing job in the Irish Midlands. She epitomizes the British fondness for stiff upper lips and is probably suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Alone and lonely, she keeps running scenes of dying soldiers on a memory loop interspersed with warnings from Miss N. not to become emotionally involved with patients.

But Anna, a clever, charming and pious girl, is not an ordinary patient. She is anorexic, having refused to eat food since her confirmation, which was celebrated on her eleventh birthday. How can she still be alive? Surely somebody—most likely her doting mother—must be slipping her food in an exploitative scheme to turn her child into a money-making attraction? Or is Anna a miracle, a potential saint who is sustained by divine intervention, or a scientific marvel who, like a plant, can transform light into nourishment? Anna’s fast evokes memories of the Great Irish Famine (1845–52). High summer is still known as the “hungry season” because many are destitute and begging on the side of the road as they await the annual potato harvest in the fall.

Everybody has something to gain from the girl’s fast. Wright will have the pleasure of exposing a cheat and thereby advancing her nursing career, the local doctor, an ignorant charlatan, longs for medical acclaim, a Dublin journalist wants a scoop, Anna’s mother and father want the glory of raising a saint, the local townspeople want to attract tourists and the possibility of secondary industry turning their “puny hamlet” into “a marvel of Christendom,” as Wright derisively puts it.

We see Anna’s deplorable situation from Wright’s point of view. She is often obtuse, ignorant and annoying as she fails to observe things that will be obvious to most readers, as in the true whereabouts of Anna’s absent older brother and the significance of his “crocodilian” appearance in the family portrait displayed on the mantle of the O’Donnell’s humble cottage.

Wright is slow to realize that she has been hired as a jailer and a spy rather than a nurse. The more effective her surveillance, the more danger she poses to the little girl by thwarting any clandestine feeding. In fact, Anna does not need a nurse. She needs a confessor or a psychological counsellor to plumb the psychological depths of the family secret that has persuaded her to fast in an exaggerated penance that even the local priest admits is way beyond anything demanded or condoned by the church.

The very nature of the watch, like all deathbed vigils, leads to pacing issues. To move the action along, Donoghue has Wright board at the local pub so she can interact with other guests including an enterprising and socially conscious journalist named William Byrne of the Irish Times. She also has Wright take her small and rapidly declining charge on forced marches around the ­neighbourhood.

It is not a spoiler to suggest that Wright needs rescuing as much as her patient, or that the plot turns on which woman—Anna’s overly devout mother or her astringent nurse—has the capacity to save the little girl. The growing relationship between the imported English nurse, the hungry journalist and the traumatized Irish girl is the heart and soul of the novel.

Pacing would not be a problem if Donoghue had written a traditional whodunit because a reader expects a fast unmasking of the villain and an even speedier resolution of the plot. But this is a novel of ideas more than action. Consequently, the transformation of key figures into villains and heroes happens too quickly. As a reader, I wanted more exposition of character, not less, and finished the book with the gnawing feeling that Donoghue had given us interesting ideas to savour, but not enough story to let us digest them ­satisfactorily.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/good-mother-bad-mother/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/good-mother-bad-mother/The House That Bill Builthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/wLEe-XbYlCA/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-house-that-bill-built/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:32 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12853For those who remember his time as premier, either vividly or loosely, William Grenville “Bill” Davis remains a unique political figure. A left-leaning Red Tory in Ontario’s Big Blue Machine, the former premier—his tenure (1971 to 1985) was the second longest in the province’s history—is certainly out of step with modern conservative thinking. He is an Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli in a political world of William F. Buckleys and Ronald Reagans. Now 87, he is remembered most of all as an affable individual who took principled positions on taxes, social services and the size of government, and famously quipped that in politics, “bland works.”

But is that all there really is to Davis? Not according to Steve Paikin’s fascinating new book, Bill Davis: Nation Builder, and Not So Bland After All. The distinguished journalist and author believes his subject’s steady hand, moderate views and political savvy created an impressive legacy that is still firmly intact. It is an old-style political model that Canadian conservatives may be reluctant to completely emulate in public, but may want to privately borrow in (ahem) small liberal doses.

Paikin has long wanted to put Davis’s life to paper, something that he touched on in his previous book, Paikin and the Premiers: Personal Reflections on a Half Century of Ontario Leaders. Existing biographies about Davis by Claire Hoy and Rosemary Speirs did not include personal stories or reflections from Davis due to the former premier’s legendary resistance to talk about himself. Paikin felt that this book, his seventh, is “the one I think I was destined to write.”

Davis grew up in Brampton, Ontario, in the 1930s, at a time when most of the “5,500 souls” who lived there “were virtually all descended from immigrants of the British Isles.” Paikin notes that Davis loved his mother but idolized his father, a well-respected Crown attorney in Peel County. His family had a strong Christian faith, and was quite supportive of the Conservatives. Davis entered the political fray in the 1959 provincial election, winning his seat in the Progressive Conservative–friendly Peel riding by just 1,203 votes. It was enough to jump-start his long political career, and he never came close to losing his seat.

One of Davis’s great political legacies was his work on education in Ontario. In 1962, he served in John Robarts’s cabinet as minister of education. It was a position that Robarts had once held; he, “unlike a lot of conservative thinkers of the time, saw a role for deep involvement by the government.” Davis felt the same way, and worked hard to improve and extend provincial educational standards. He has been called the father of Ontario’s community college system for making this level of education more desirable for high school ­graduates.

Davis’s success on the education file made him a huge favourite to replace Robarts when he stepped down in 1970; he had three quarters of the party caucus publicly backing him. As an introvert, Davis was, Paikin notes, at times painfully shy “and at this point in his life still surprisingly weak at working a roomful of people.” Fortunately, being an introvert does not always destroy a political career—former prime minister Stephen Harper can attest to this—and Davis recovered to become the new P.C. leader and Ontario premier.

Davis’s queasiness about partisan party politics was vital to his own political success. He always broke bread with politicians across the aisle, and never stayed angry at rivals.

The book’s examination of Davis’s lengthy political run is, in many ways, a thing of beauty. Davis led two majority governments as well as two minority governments. This is the equivalent of a throbbing headache for even the most experienced of politicians, but Davis took it in stride. He often had a puckish grin on his face, and his sly sense of humour put people at ease. His political mentor, former premier Thomas Kennedy, once told him that “in politics you don’t often get in trouble for the laws you don’t pass or the speeches you don’t give”—which Davis adjusted to “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can avoid doing altogether.”

By now the seeds of Bill Davis’s Ontario were being planted. He played a significant role in creating TVO (Paikin’s television show, The Agenda is taped in the William G. Davis Studio), the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the province’s first ministry of the environment—institutions that many Ontarians may take for granted. Along the way, he never balanced a budget.

For all the talk of his being bland, Davis could be surprisingly passionate. Consider his stunning decision to reverse course and introduce full Catholic school funding in 1984. It was “completely out of character,” writes Paikin, and “shocked the province’s political establishment to its core.” Some people believed at the time that Davis had finally given in to Cardinal Gerald Emmett Carter, the archbishop of Toronto, who had continually tried—and failed—to convince the premier that provincial funding was necessary. Even his minister of education, Bette Stephenson, “knew nothing about that day’s historic announcement,” writes Paikin, whereas her deputy minister did “and was sworn to secrecy by the premier’s office.” While some have argued it was done for political gain—even though the majority of Catholics did, and still do, vote Liberal—it appears to have been a question of principle for the premier. As Davis told Paikin, “I was thinking about it from 1962 onward. There wasn’t a more fundamental issue that had been part of our political history more so than that issue.”

Davis also intervened in a municipal matter, siding with the activists, including Jane Jacobs, and brought down a “decade of planning, politicking, and protesting” about the proposed Spadina Expressway in Toronto. While he played an important part in patriating the Constitution, he disagreed with Pierre Trudeau during discussions about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, stating that extending French language rights would continue in Ontario, but that “forcing bilingualism on any provincial government by constitutional means would evoke the kind of bad feeling and resentment which will set the cause of French-English relations back many decades.”

Davis was politically shrewd. He was encouraged to run for the federal P.C. leadership in 1983, and would have had significant support. Yet his cautious nature prevented it. As the man who would ultimately win the leadership, Brian Mulroney, once said, “What Bill Davis could not do is run and lose after such a glorious career. And there was no guarantee he would win.”

There is another distinguishing feature to Davis’s character. As Paikin writes, “For a loyalist, Davis actually had a rather balanced view on the value of political parties. They were a necessary fact of life in politics … and clearly there was a place for partisanship in politics. But obviously in his heart Davis didn’t believe in much of the ultra-partisan viciousness in which parties indulged back then, and certainly not in the over-the-top ideological warfare they routinely engaged in during the Stephen Harper years.”

I disagree with the author’s unnecessarily cynical view of political tactics and strategies. This is the way the political game has been played for years in most countries, long before Harper became prime minister, and it has helped create crisper, more concentrated campaigns and policies. That being said, Davis’s queasiness about partisan party politics was vital to his own political success. He always broke bread with politicians across the aisle, and never stayed angry at rivals. While this particular leadership style would not succeed in today’s polarized political environment, it is admirable, and contains qualities that we could, and should, learn from.

What will Davis’s legacy ultimately be? He told the author, “historians will do what they want to do. I don’t worry about what they’ll say.” With respect to Paikin’s historical account, it has greatly enhanced our knowledge of this premier’s personality, permanently coloured in any so-called blandness—and shows it is still Bill Davis’s Ontario.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-house-that-bill-built/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-house-that-bill-built/Unfriendedhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/E8PVphCkikE/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/unfriended/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:29 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12854The Enlightenment instantiated a wide-ranging cultural revolution that reshaped western identity. It is the crucible from which modern western societies emerged, and our mental architecture continues to employ the categories, language and concepts of its thought. As the Italian scholar Vincenzo Ferrone memorably put it, the Enlightenment is the “laboratory of modernity.” So while it might take some effort to imaginatively enter, say, the world of Socrates, Aristotle or Augustine, it is relatively easy for us to think ourselves into an 18th-century mindset. And this is for the straightforward reason that the complexity of ideas, institutions and practices that so exercised the philosophers of Paris, the learned societies of Edinburgh or the delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia continue to animate and inform our own world.

It is from the 18th century that we have inherited a Kantian morality of rights and duties. Such rights and duties, Kant famously argued, are universally and categorically binding on all peoples everywhere. Hence one of the major strands of Enlightenment thought is a robust universalism that asserts that moral injunctions must hold for all peoples and all times. On Kant’s account, to act morally is to act autonomously, which means to act free from the constraints of history, nature and circumstance: I must will only that which I can will to become a universal law.

To understand the place of friendship in the good life as well as in social and political frameworks, we must go back millennia.

Such universalism is opposed to the idea that ethical obligations accrue by virtue of our allegiance to a smaller, more immediate constituency such as friends, family, community or country. The Kantian, universalizing will must necessarily deny that the proximity of some or the distance of others has any moral force. The categorical demand that we detach ourselves from any particular social standpoint ushers in a distinctively modern and novel understanding of moral agency. As the late Bernard Williams noted:

It has been in every society a recognizable ethical thought, and remains so in ours, that one can be under a [moral] requirement … simply because of who one is and of one’s social situation. It may be a kind of consideration that some people in Western societies now would not want to accept, but it has been accepted by almost everyone in the past, and there is no necessity in the demand that every requirement of this kind must, under rational scrutiny, be … abandoned.

It has always remained puzzling how the abstract, disembodied consciousness, such as required by the Kantian ethic, could produce determinate moral principles in the empirical world. Is not the empirical world of family, friends, co-workers, community and state—the world that we encounter in ordinary experience—morally significant? Why, for example, should we omit from our canon of moral reasoning something as crucial to the good life as friendship?

John von Heyking, professor of political science at the University of Lethbridge, has written an ambitious book, one that challenges us to rethink many of the assumptions we have inherited from the Enlightenment. He notes that when considering “the grand sweep of historical movements and the great ideas of political philosophy, it is easy to overlook the interplay of personal relationships as the crucible of political and moral decision-making.” Specifically, The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship sets out to recover the understanding of virtue-friendship in Aristotle and Plato, and its relationship to the political order. For von Heyking, “friendships are the highest kind of personal relationships, and they play an important part in shaping our political world.” To understand the place of friendship in the pursuit of the good life, as well as in social and political frameworks, we must go back millennia, toPlato and Aristotle, who have provided us with the richest, most rigorous and most profound analysis of what friendship is, as well as of its larger implications.

It is curious that the concept of friendship, despite its centrality to human flourishing and well-being, has been largely ignored by contemporary philosophers. As the author notes, “friendship has been lost as a category of political analysis for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that we have difficulty even discussing what friendship is. Our popular vocabulary of intimate relations draws almost exclusively from romanticism, which prevents us from even conceiving of such relations other than in erotic and bodily terms.” This volume goes some way to correcting this deficiency. It confirms for modern readers what the ancients understood very well: namely, that friendship is a topic of enduring interest, both in and of itself, and because it has profound implications for much broader political and moral contexts. The ancient Greeks as well as the Biblical tradition agree that “friendship is the pinnacle of the moral life.” The fundamental aim of this book is “retrieving a vocabulary about the moral good of friendship, and considering its significance for the realities of politics.”

In stark contrast to the autonomous, universalizing will of the Kantian moral agent, von Heyking seeks to resuscitate an older form of political allegiance and moral obligation, one that takes seriously the notion that living and dwelling together is, from a moral point of view, deeply significant. As Socrates says in the Apology, “I will do this [engage in philosophic questioning] to whomever, younger or older, I happen to meet, both foreigner and townsman, but more so to the townsmen, inasmuch as you are closer to me in kin.” “Kin” here refers not only to family connections, but to those “with whom we have been brought together, for reasons beyond our comprehension; they are those with whom we dwell and for whom we have the deepest responsibility.” Echoing Socrates, von Heyking argues that our kin are worthy of special moral consideration. The book may be read as a meditation on how, exactly, this special moral consideration arises, and what precisely it entails.

The heart of this undertaking is an exegesis of the concept of friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the Poetics, as well as two works by Plato, namely, his dialogue dedicated to friendship, Lysis, as well as the Laws. The author tells us that he decided to write a book about friendship because there is “no other topic in politics, or ethics, that really matters.”

He also offers some penetrating observations about friendship and its relation to the political realm. For example, “the incapacity to practise friendship might explain why one finds lonely individuals looking to politics, in the form of utopianism, solidarity, and other romantic adventures, as a way of experiencing the erotic intensity they lack in virtue-friendships.” Or again, “the extreme of the isolated politician is, of course, the tyrant, whom Plato and Aristotle regarded as incapable of friendship and thus of achieving life’s greatest goods.”

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously distinguished three types of friendship: utility, pleasure and virtue. Utility friendships exist among those who do business together, while pleasure friendships—such as those enjoyed by members of a sports team or by drinking buddies—are ones in which individuals share bodily pleasures of various kinds. But it is virtue friendship that is the highest form, when friends love each other for their character. It is only people who are “serious about their own moral character” who conduct such friendships, and, as friends, encourage each other to make good choices regarding virtue. Critically, such friendships involve sharing the intellect and seeking the common good: “the greatest acts of friendship are those performed by friends seeking the common good together, which includes seeking to understand the common good.”

This joint perception and awareness by friends is the culminating activity of virtue friendship, and is referred to as sunaisthesis. It is sunaisthetic friendship that is the most intense kind of virtue friendship. It is characterized by shared intellectual activity, shared insights and “intellects conjointly knowing and being known,” living together and sharing conversation and thinking. As Hannah Arendt notes, “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and of ourselves.”

Sunaisthesis forms the crown of Aristotle’s teaching about friendship, because it “expresses friends’ common activity in perceptions and thought … Friends behold one another, and themselves, beholding the good. The intellectual and moral virtues are fully activated.” According to von Heyking, this is what Aristotle means when he suggests that friendship is not merely a singular virtue, but the entiretyof virtues: “As a particular virtue, friendship has its own set of practices and obligations. As the entirety of virtue, friendship is the moral horizon in which the other virtues operate.” For von Heyking, “the more we can leaven political life with our experiences of sunaisthetic friendship, the greater chance we have of bringing decency [and] justice … to politics.” As he notes, “so much of politics … is a history of loyalties and betrayals.” One thinks, for example, of the friendship between Churchill and Roosevelt that sustained the Allied war effort, or the crucial friendship between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, which led to the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. And in this country, we can reference the friendship between John A. Macdonald and George-Étienne Cartier, “the Siamese twins” who were Confederation’s guides.

Somewhat surprisingly, the other Aristotelian text surveyed is the Poetics. In a chapter titled “Political Friendship as Storytelling,” von Heyking demonstrates the importance of mimesis and storytelling for political friendship. Political friendship is, most of all, “the activity of citizens, contemplating together, through mimesis, the moral actions of the decent.” Specifically, tragedy is the story form that best teaches citizens to “bear responsibility together for their choices even when they are mistaken.” “Tragedy,” he writes, “silences our ‘prejudices,’ at least temporarily, and puts us into the position of seeing the person … before us as he is.” Tragedies elicit in us both pity and fear, and force us to recognize that “we too can be ignorant of our own identity, and of the manner in which our excellences can lead to our downfall.” Most importantly, the shared stories of the community recollect the shared actions of a political society. This shared understanding of political friendship shows how it constitutes an intermediate space for citizens’ action, between the solitary individual and the universal. For von Heyking, it is festivity that best exemplifies the intermediate space, and that binds citizens to one another in political friendship. In the concluding chapter, he examines one of Canada’s most famous civic festivals, the Calgary Stampede, which “transforms the workaday world of the ranch worker into a playful celebration of universal humanity, our relationship with the animal world, and the cosmos.”

In Part Two of the book, we move from the common sense philosophy of Aristotle to the more ethereal speculations of Plato in his dialogues the Lysis and the Laws. As the scholar Mark Vernon remarks, “the Lysis offers a portrayal of friendship as a way of life in which, at its best, Socratic philosophy and becoming friends are one and the same thing.” With Aristotle, Plato’s focus is on sunaisthesis friendship, and the Lysis shows how our experience of the good makes possible our ability to love our friend. For Plato, friendship is a movement of divine love, in which human beings participate and to which they are reoriented so that they might behold their friend as an individual. For Plato, writes von Heyking, “philosophy is an existential movement of the soul in friendship, reaching out in love to the good and the beautiful. … [In the Lysis] Plato appeals to Hermes—the most human, most creative, and thus the more political of Olympians—to show how we must open ourselves up to the divine in order to fully love our friend as an individual person.”

For von Heyking, Platonic politics is predicated on friendship, and “to act according to reason, to act with moral intent, is to act for the purpose of friendship.” Moreover, “friendship is the telos of the moral act, and … the intellectual act as well.” I must confess that I was taken aback when I read these claims. Surely this is to claim too much for Plato’s account of friendship. Is it not more accurate to say that Plato’s stance on politics and his education of the Guardians is predicated on his contempt for amateurs entering the political arena (what might he have made of Trump!)? Similarly, when Plato wants us to act according to reason, is it really for purposes of friendship? Or is it rather that we act according to reason so that one’s soul accords with the harmony of the cosmos, ensuring that the order without is reflected in the order within the individual self? Nevertheless, even if one is not entirely convinced by his somewhat surprising Platonic thesis, von Heyking presents a compelling ­argument.

Von Heyking writes very well. And one appreciates the catholicity of learning on display. His wide-ranging references (everyone from Montaigne to Aritha Van Herk to Roger Scruton) and his ability to make connections between, for example, the thought of de Tocqueville and Plato, provide the reader with acute, and frequently surprising, insights.

In writing the book (a task that took a dozen years), he came to understand that “the task of understanding a philosopher’s view on friendship obliges one to try to understand nearly everything else about that philosopher.” When the philosophers in question are Plato and Aristotle, that is a daunting task.

Whatever quibbles we might have with the details, in the end the author succeeds admirably, in that his monograph elevates friendship to its rightful place as a topic of proper philosophical speculation. And it strikes me too that in these pages John von Heyking exemplifies that shared insight which is the sunaisthetic moment, and that lies at the heart of his thesis: “Our discoveries of fundamental truths coincide with discoveries about ourselves and each other, done together. This, in essence, is what liberal education is about.”

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/unfriended/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/unfriended/Shaken, and Stirredhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/nyc5ylXuMD8/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/shaken-and-stirred/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:25 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12855The world’s most famous earthquake occurred on the San Andreas Fault in northern California early in the morning of April 18, 1906, in two shocks separated by a pause and lasting between 45 and 60 seconds in all. The lower part of San Francisco’s City Hall collapsed almost instantaneously, as did many other buildings. But the fire that started after the earthquake had disabled the main water supply was what destroyed the city. Despite heroic efforts from firefighters and dynamiting of buildings to create fire-breaks, the fire burned for three days until it was at last deprived of fuel. By then it had devoured 508 blocks and more than 28,000 buildings, extending over 12.2 square kilometres (three quarters of the city and about eight times the area destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666), killed more than 3,000 people and cost at least $500 million. Combined with the earthquakes, it left 225,000 people—more than half of San Francisco’s population—homeless.

Nearly a century later, it seems, we had not come much further in our understanding of earthquakes, or our preparedness for them.On December 26, 2004, whenan area of seabed off Sumatra of staggering dimensions—similar in size to half of California—slipped about ten metres, the event came, once again, out of nowhere. The tsunami it produced famouslycreated havoc in several countries around the Indian Ocean, as far away from the earthquake’s epicentre as Sri Lanka, and caused about 230,000 deaths. The country worst affected was Indonesia, especially the province of Aceh at the northern end of Sumatra, where the coastal regions were flattened by a wall of water and almost 170,000 people perished. Perhaps the most famous photograph of the disaster shows a ship lying on top of a ruined house in Banda Aceh.

Neither the San Francisco earthquake nor the one that caused the 2004 tsunamiwas predicted, and at present there is no realistic possibility of seismologists predicting the timing of great earthquakes, despite more than a century of scientific research. Earthquake forecasting is like weather forecasting would be, if all the clouds were hidden deep underground. Even the world’s leading scientists and technologists working in Silicon Valley and the California Institute of Technology (home of Charles Richter, famous for his Richter scale)—both of which lie right by the San Andreas Fault—have made little progress with successful earthquake forecasting.

Earthquakes tend to be forgotten and subsumed into wars, economic cycles, epidemic and environmental abuses. People wrongly suppress their awareness of them out of anxiety at their helplessness.

This dark chasm in our understanding is one focus of Andrew Robinson’s contemplative book Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations and Civilization. Robinson is the author of more than 25 books issued by leading general and academic publishers and covering three main areas: science and the history of science, archaeology and scripts, and Indian history and culture. His books have been translated into 13 European languages, as well as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. This newest work is a scholarly but terrifyingbook examining how humans and earthquakes have interacted, not only in the short term but also in the long perspective of history.

From earliest times, Robinson notes—at least as far back as the ancient Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE—humans have cohabited with seismicity in a “fatal attraction” (the evocative phrase of geophysicist James Jackson), because the advantages of living in many earthquake-prone regions, such as Greece, Italy, California and Japan, easily outweigh the disadvantages. In the 21st century, more than half of the world’s largest metropolises—as many as 60 cities—lie on plate tectonic boundaries, such as California’s San Andreas Fault, in areas of major seismic activity. They include Ankara, Athens, Beijing, Cairo, Caracas, Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kathmandu, Lisbon, Lima, Los Angeles, Manila, Mexico City, Naples, Osaka, Rome, San Francisco, Santiago, Shanghai, Singapore, Taipei, Tehran and Tokyo. Manyof them have suffered major destruction from earthquakes during the past two or three centuries.

Nevertheless, they have all recovered remarkably quickly, and sometimes prospered as a result of the recovery process—as happened in San Francisco after 1906. This, combined with the infrequency of great earthquakes in exactly the same place—even in California and Japan—and their unpredictability mean that they tend to be underestimated as a threat by residents of these cities. As Robinson wisely points out, “this neglect of future earthquakes by the general public is not simple to explain, especially when we recall that archaeologists and historians, too, generally neglect earthquakes.”

Earthquakes tend to be forgotten and subsumed into wars, economic cycles, epidemic and environmental abuses. Also large earthquakes are infrequent events, but they are no less dangerous or inevitable. And people wrongly suppress their awareness of earthquakes out of anxiety at their helplessness. The events strike with only minimal if any warning, and no effective protection. Perhaps that is why we do not think too much about them. We think, quite incorrectly, that we are in control of our own destinies. Yet “amnesia makes for poor history,” as Robinson says.

In some cases, thephysical devastation of earthquakeshas been followed by cataclysmic decline. Consider the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, which helped to trigger the militarization of Japanese society in the late 1920s and ’30s, and pave its subsequent path to world war. The probability of this happening again is quite likely as people, in search of attractive landscapes and economic prosperity, seem to have made a Faustian bargain with the risk of ruin and destruction. Interestingly enough, even in the 21st century, earthquakes are “acts of God,” inherently totally beyond human control—and seismologists have not been able to monitor the impending probability of earthquakes with any degree of certainty. Robinson’s stimulating study puts the impact of earthquakes on history into proper perspective, and the case studies he has chosen to write about lead us not only to a better understanding of how seismology has developed as a science but also to the very real probability that these terrible disasters can happen again.

Nevertheless, by paying some attention to earth-shattering events and how they have affected history and modern civilization we could perhaps learn how to coexist more securely and creatively with seismic hazard.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/shaken-and-stirred/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/shaken-and-stirred/The Home Fronthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/RSq8bcLQx5M/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-home-front/#commentsFri, 25 Nov 2016 18:19:22 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12856Sigmund Freud observed that individuals can become fixated on their moment of trauma. The life of Roméo Dallaire is proof of this. Twenty-two years on from the Rwandan genocide, and a little over a decade since the publication of his first book on the conflict, Shake Hands with the Devil, he has written once more of a place and time that holds him captive. He begins his book Waiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD by placing his suffering alongside that of the Ancient Mariner, both men doomed by circumstances beyond their control to a life of emotional pain. This comparison is apt to begin with, but as the general’s past reveals, their shared path down the long road of sorrow diverges. There is an inspiring message embedded in Dallaire’s tale of woe, namely how resilience can kick in, lift a man out of a very dark place, and become the driving force for recovery and redemption. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The subtitle of Dallaire’s book is “My ongoing battle with PTSD.” The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder first appeared in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Emotional trauma, of course, has a much longer history, and antecedents to PTSD were called shell shock, battle fatigue and soldier’s heart (Da Costa syndrome), among other terms. What was significant about the DSM-III taxonomy, however, was that the core clinical features of the syndrome as we understand it today were for the first time clearly defined. Subsequent versions of the DSM, particularly the DSM-V in 2013, modified the 1980 criteria while leaving the central tenets intact.

Of late, as large numbers of veterans have returned home from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the struggles of some with the emotional fallout of combat have become evident, the spotlight has fallen on the disorder. So much has now been written on the topic that the letters PTSD have entered our vernacular. This recognition is to be welcomed, but with the important caveat that the diagnosis be applied correctly. One downside of this surge of interest is that the bar has been lowered, that PTSD is now bandied about as a catch-all for anyone who has had some kind of adverse life experience. This is patently absurd. It is therefore germane, when reading Dallaire’s book, to have a broad understanding of what those four little letters really mean and what kind of stressors qualify for inclusion.

Here the DSM-V is very clear. To receive the diagnosis of PTSD an individual must have been exposed to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence by directly experiencing the traumatic event(s), or witnessing, in person, the event(s) as they occurred to others. In response to this, a constellation of symptoms may arise, which from a diagnostic standpoint must include four discrete clusters: intrusion symptoms (such as unwanted intrusive memories or images, flashbacks and dreams), persistent avoidance of stimuli (such as efforts to avoid activities, places or physical reminders that arouse recollections of the traumatic events), negative thoughts (such as shame, guilt, confusion, sadness, social withdrawal) and alteration in arousal (such as irritability, poor concentration, difficulty falling and staying asleep, hypervigilance). When symptoms such as these coalesce in response to an overwhelming stressor, they can bring down a person very hard indeed. This is what befell General Dallaire. Those who read his first book will know some of this. Waiting for First Light reveals the full extent of his emotional collapse.

The great warriors of ancient Greece, Hercules and Ajax, were laid low not by combat, but by their homecomings. It was not lack of courage that was their undoing, but rather the routine of life away from the front lines.

Viewed with the wisdom of hindsight, the events that surround Dallaire’s time in Rwanda and his return to Canada read like a perfect storm, a series of institutional mistakes and at times exercises insheer idiocy that sucked a brave man into the PTSD vortex. In 1993, Dallaire was dispatched to Rwanda as commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda tasked with implementing the Arusha Peace Agreement between the warring parties. The road to damnation is paved with good intentions. Short of resources and manpower, and with his political masters in New York tying his hands, Dallaire was forced to stand by helplessly as the country descended into hell. “Meanwhile, all across Rwanda, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder,” wrote Phillip Gourevitch in his memorable book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. It was on Dallaire’s watch that the murder was perpetrated in 1994. In three months, at least 800,000 Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, were slaughtered. When the killings were largely over, a shattered Dallaire asked to be relieved of his command. As he divulges, a request like this was unheard of. In making it, he felt like a failure, but was driven to do so by a realization that if he fell apart in the field, the effects on the mission and the troops he commanded, already stressed by their impotence in the face of mass murder, would be severe. Little did he know that his personal battle with mental illness was only beginning.

With the UNAMIR mission doomed to fail on a catastrophic scale, Dallaire returned to a Canadian military establishment blind to his distress. There was no trauma debriefing, but instead a prodigious workload in an army reeling from a breakdown in discipline within the Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia, as well asslashed budgets and escalating suicides in soldiers returning from peace­keeping missions in the Balkans. Along the way, work decisions and social circumstances separated the general from his wife and children, removing one of the most important buffers to psychological distress in someone who has been traumatized. Dallaire’s wife had not been schooled in how to cope with the wounded warrior who had returned home. The inability on the part of the Canadian military to appreciate the long arm of PTSD, to understand how spouses and children are affected too, is another of the many failings laid bare in this book. It is heartbreaking to picture the general, emotionally and physically spent, driving the 450 kilometres every Friday night between his office in Ottawa and his family in Quebec City, desperate for some time with his wife and children only to arrive feeling irritable and emotionally cut off from those he loves most. Reading these affecting passages one’s thoughts go to hisfamily as well, the tranquil beauty of Quebec City clearly no antidote to the pain of Rwanda brought home into their ­living room.

One can read into Dallaire’s long days at his desk an element of avoidance, a core PTSD feature. But,as days darkened into nights and the world around him slowed, the unwanted images of Rwanda could no longer be kept at bay. Sleep, rather than being restorative, unlocked the floodgates of memory—which is why Waiting for First Light is such a telling title for this cris de coeur memoir.

The challenges of leaving war behind and reintegrating into civil society have been frequently underestimated by the military. Sebastian Junger explores this theme in depth in his recent book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, and posits that the alienation felt by many returning veterans contributes to the development of their PTSD. The ancient Greeks knew this only too well. Their great warriors, Hercules and Ajax, were laid low not by combat, in which they excelled and for which they were richly honoured, but by their homecomings. These men of immense strength could not leave war behind them. It was not lack of courage that was their undoing, but rather the routine of life away from the front lines. While there are similarities between these Grecian legends and the fate of Roméo Dallaire, there is one important difference. Hercules and Ajax were welcomed back as heroes; the general was not. How could he be? There was a genocide to explain and, although the horror was clearly not of his making, it remains as a permanent stain on the conscience of the United Nations and the world community. Which brings me to the subject of moral injury. Dallaire gets to this late in his book, but from my reading of his personal journey, it is surely one of the factors that has caused him the greatest distress and, in turn, has been the impetus to positive actions that have given his life at present much meaning.

Roméo Dallaire suffered a great moral injury during his time in Rwanda. What he initially saw as his personal failing was really his own misplaced guilt. The failing lay elsewhere, among institutions and people far more powerful than a lieutenant general. While PTSD is not synonymous with moral injury, the two can be closely intertwined as Dallaire’s history reveals. As he set about painstakingly rebuilding his life after the nadir of an attempted suicide, moral injury appears to have been the catalyst for post-traumatic growth. Dallaire has lectured relentlessly on the Rwanda genocide, hoping to educate Canadians and those further afield on the subject. He has become a champion of wounded veterans. He was invited to a year-long fellowship at Harvard University by Samantha Power, author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, then the director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy. In 2007 he launched the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, a global partnership based at Dalhousie University aimed at progressively eradicating the use and recruitment of child soldiers.

And yet, amid these accomplishments and many others, signs of fragility still peek through. We should not be surprised by this. Memories of genocide can never be forgotten. The best that can be hoped for is that their emotional sting lessens with time and therapy. As Waiting for First Light reveals, the general is not yet out of the woods, and, given what we know of the long-term effects of overwhelming psychological trauma, he may never be. No doubt he knows this too. All the more credit to him, therefore, that he has been able to seize the day and divert his decades of hurt into activities that provide succour and hope to those who, like him, carry war’s emotional scars.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-home-front/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-home-front/Bubble Weary in Trump’s Americahttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/1oNoMQWdAjo/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/bubble-weary-in-trumps-america/#commentsWed, 23 Nov 2016 21:02:02 +0000Alastair Chenghttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12863I live on a hilltop in Arkansas with my husband, kids, parents, father-in-law and a rotating cast of animals. The current pets are rescues: a tabby cat, a chocolate Lab, a box turtle, an Australian python and a bearded dragon. My husband met someone in a vet’s office with a son going off to college and wanting to get rid of the snake. He found the bearded dragon sunning on the bike path. It was May, near some college housing—maybe its owner got bored and decided to dump it? My husband, who keeps spare terraria in our garage, popped the lizard in his pannier. We named it Spike.

In the past, we have had a wine carafe of tadpoles, scooped from a puddle, as a dining table centrepiece. Twice, native snakes collected in our yard have given birth in our living room. At one point, twelve baby king snakes were living in our window seat. My husband requisitioned half the Tupperware and punched holes in the lids: each egg needed its own hatching habitat or it might get eaten by its mom. We fed them worms we dug daily.

I usually confess all this with a wry, long-suffering expression, as though I am a martyr. Do I, in fact, enjoy the frisson of rustic glamour brought by the seething, unexpected life under my roof? In fact, I do. Do these animals cost me time, money and effort? Yes. Do they make the lives of my family richer? I guess. We care for these animals although we cannot know their minds. They do not, with the exception of the Lab and maybe the cat, a little, show any particular interest in us. Looking after them is educational and we feel it is, in some vague way, a moral good. Also, they amuse us.

But my fake martyrdom is even faker than you think: my “hilltop in Arkansas” is situated in Fayetteville, a congenial college town. My study window looks out over a valley filled right now with roseate leaves, threaded with trails. I bike to work at the university past great coffee shops and a used bookstore half a block long. Any minute now, I will see my neighbour walk past with his son in a stroller; he is an Arkansan who became a hedge fund manager in New York but who then convinced his Turkish-born, Manhattan-raised wife to move back to raise their kids in Fayetteville.

She was skeptical. I was, too, coming here ten years ago; but this town turns out to be relatively culturally rich. The university ensures a high density of interesting people, so you can easily end up talking about Proust while watching your toddler play at the park. We have an excellent performing arts centre and public library, although both are heavily subsidized by the Walton Family Foundation, headquartered in a town a few miles north of us. Walmart’s original storefront, on a town square featuring a statue of a confederate soldier, is now a 1950s-style soda counter and “museum”—a gallery of tributes to this emblem of global capitalism. We like to say we are the only community in the world that can “buy local” at Walmart.

Which is to say I live in a bubble, a term much bandied about in the days after the 2016 election came to its thundering close, mostly levelled at the upper middle class, East Coast, college-educated, metropolitan liberal elites who have been ignoring the pain of the unemployed blue-collar populations in the dying factory towns of the heartland.

The neighbour who walks past our house every morning sent me a quiz shortly after the election: “Do You Live in a Bubble?” I texted back, “Um, obviously. But I’ll take it. Love me a quiz.” (This is one of the southern linguistic formulations I have most taken to, together with “y’all.”) The quiz, designed by Charles Murray, a libertarian and a fellow at the Enterprise Institute, asks questions such as whether you have ever: lived in a town under 50,000 where you did not go to college; known an evangelical Christian; had a job that caused something to hurt at the end of the day (carpal tunnel syndrome does not count); bought a pickup truck; participated in a parade not involving global warming, a war protest or gay rights; worn a uniform since leaving school; watched Dr. Phil; or bought domestic, mass-market beer to fill your own fridge. The more of these things you say yes to, the thinner your bubble. The group described by those behaviours is the one that many of the analysts, on both sides of the political divide, say washed Trump to power: middle America, angry that its members can no longer earn a living wage in a factory and, in a subsidiary way, threatened by the values that the Democratic party—once the party of the working class, now the champion of liberal elites, of immigrants and refugees, of LGBTQ Americans—displayed by choosing Clinton, a condescending, double-talking woman, to represent them in this race.

Pundits are recommending that Brooklyn hipsters move to small Midwestern towns. Some of my friends, in the immediate aftermath of the election, tried to talk with friends and relatives in the Rust Belt, to hear them out, whether because they did not already understand their frustration or because they felt it important somehow to build bridges. I already felt inundated with articles on this group’s grievances in the liberal media I consume; I had lost count of the headlines announcing yet another dissection of working class anger. In this analysis, people in towns that, from the 1940s through the ’70s were sustained by manufacturing, now can barely get minimum-wage work. And they do not want minimum-wage work—they want the assembly-line jobs that used to pay them what I make as a professor at a public university. Somehow, though, their anger is not directed at the companies outsourcing their labour in search of higher profits, and permitted to do so by treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. It might be directed somewhat at technologies making them redundant. Mostly, it appeared to be directed at Hillary and liberals and Mexican immigrants and Muslims.

Why is that? “The dream is not to become upper-middle-class, with its different food, family, and friendship patterns; the dream is to live in your own class milieu, where you feel comfortable—just with more money.” So says a Harvard Business Review piece called “What So Many People Don’t Get about the U.S. Working Class.” According to the writer, Joan Williams, this is why those voters identify with Trump, despite his being a billionaire, a silver spoon New Yorker: “the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich … Owning one’s own business—that’s the goal. That’s another part of Trump’s appeal.”

Trump speaks the way they speak; he eats the things they eat; he has no interest in the books and facts and civil rights they have no interest in. Sorry. That last bit sounded like bubblespeak. But this has to be part of why these voters trusted him more than they trusted Hillary, despite the fact that he probably would get a lower score on the bubble quiz than I did, and despite the unlikeliness that Trump, who surely is still benefiting from the free movement of capital enabled by neoliberal trade policies, would now dismantle such agreements and “bring jobs back to America,” as the refrain went.

In other words, this vote was not only a referendum on the economy; it was in many ways a referendum on American identity and values. There is a Nikki Giovanni poem I kept coming across when I was reading about unwarranted arrests and killings of black men. It seems germane:

Allowables
I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn’t
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don’t think
I’m allowed

To kill something
Because I am

Frightened

Statistics suggest people will swerve to avoid hitting a turtle but will swerve to run over a snake. I often see that instinctual fear of snakes, from guests, in our living room, although our python is behind glass and cannot even bite very hard. We do not like this snake—it is inbred, unintelligent and unfriendly, unlike the king snakes, which were beautiful and relaxed easily in our arms. But the python lives here now—this is its home. It did not have anywhere else to go. Australia is sure not looking to welcome it back onto native soil, after three generations of living and breeding in America, serving America’s need for exotic pets.

I have a friend, Matthew, who grew up in Harrison, Arkansas, a town a few hours east of Fayetteville that was in the national news a few years ago for a billboard at the town entrance that reads “Anti-Racist Is a Code Word for Anti-White.” There were protests and an official statement from the mayor saying that he considered the sign “inflammatory, distasteful and not in line with the truth on how Harrison is a city of welcoming and tolerant citizens.” Still, the sign remains, at the entrance to Matthew’s parents’ subdivision. Harrison, a biracial town until the early 20th century, had driven its black residents out and then was a “sundown town”—a town that posted warnings that no black people should be caught there after dark—until some surprisingly recent time.

I don’t think the white working class is mostly resentful that we in the liberal bubble are not trying to understand them. I think they are resentful that their bubble has been popped.

A few days before the election, Matthew told me a story from his childhood: he was standing around with “some moms, pillars of the community” after a parade. The two or three black families in town, recent arrivals, were cleaning up after the horses, the only job anyone would give them. The moms started talking about them. “Right in front of me, they all turned racist. The language they used. Completely without apology or self-consciousness.” He had never seen the moms like this, apparently because there was no one to bring it out in them.

This seems key: the structures that preserve white communities are often invisible. It also seems important to point out that a huge proportion of educated, white-collar whites also voted for Trump, although there are indications that they would not say that to pollsters, and so accounted in some part for the surprising result. Perhaps the white working class has more in common with these elites than either of those classes realized or will admit.

But I don’t think the angry segment of the white working class is mostly resentful that we in the liberal bubble are not trying to understand them—we do understand them, up to a point. I think they are resentful that their bubble has been popped and that we have different names for their beliefs. Under a microscope, few credos can be defended as objective or rational. The fallback position, then, is to make them defensible on the basis that they define an identity.

The NPR show This American Life, a great favourite of my bubble, ran a number of election-related pieces last month. One was a dispatch from St. Cloud, Minnesota. In the last 20 years, a number of Somalis have settled there and in other Minnesota towns, fleeing a civil war and a famine. St. Cloud has gone from almost all white (it used to be nicknamed “White Cloud”) to five percent Somali—10,000 out of about 190,000 residents. In 2013, the Somalis proposed a mosque. In response, St. Cloud residents formed a committee, “St. Cloud Citizens for Reasonable Zoning,” to resist this. In 2015, in a meeting with their local congressman, this group said they “wanted to talk about assimilation. Nobody asked us if we, in St. Cloud, want those Somalis. We didn’t ask for these people. The people have no control over any immigration.”

At first, the congressman was outraged, saying no one could tell legal immigrants where to live, and that Somalis were among the fastest-­integrating immigrant groups: “If you’re asking me how I feel about immigrant populations who are in this country legally, and who are actually trying to find a better way for themselves and their families, I support it wholeheartedly.”

But then a woman stood up to speak, someone the congressman knew. She said, “We also work hard, and we also pay our taxes. And we also have kids to raise and go to school … And I think part of the fear—some of you talked about our fear—is that we don’t feel in control of what’s happening in our city. It is out of our control. Where is our say on what happens to our schools?” She wanted the same thing the previous speaker did—a moratorium on immigration, to St. Cloud, to the United States—but the congressman heard her differently, because, he thought, “this is a problem, because this person is not that way … This person is not a xenophobe, not a racist.”

This is the sort of qualifier almost anyone hears when talking to a reasonable person who is a Trump supporter or defends Trump supporters. I wrote to one such friend the day after the election: a Christian, but not one of the lefty Episcopalians of my Fayetteville circle. John and I met on a plane a couple of year ago and fell into a warm conversation that lasted three hours. His most salient qualities are humility and graciousness, but he tends to credit his ethics to his Christian devotion. He believes literally in the resurrection; this came up in our first conversation. We also talked about family (he has four children, all adopted, one mixed race) and literature (he started the conversation by asking me about the book I was reading) and the minimum wage, which was the only point we really debated that day. He is a good listener and believes in hard work and giving back: he has grown a small equipment company into a regional force, and gives ten percent of his profits—in the millions—to charities, mostly ones suggested by his employees.

In my email to John on November 9, I said I was in pain and asked him how he felt about the election: “I’m sure you know people who voted for Donald Trump (you may have even voted for him). I believe many might feel they needed to vote for him because he was the candidate of a party that would defend many of their values, despite how he has promoted racism and misogyny, at his rallies and in his private life. I also know of at least one Christian leader, a lifelong Republican, who spoke vehemently against him.”

John’s response was that both candidates were equally morally flawed and that he thought Christians who voted for Trump mostly did it to ensure a conservative Supreme Court. “I do know that there are a lot of people who did vote for Trump who are not racists, bigots, ignorant or deplorable,” John said. “They open their homes to the homeless, they defend the oppressed and seek freedom for the captives. But in either camp, you will also have some pretty nasty people who are deplorable and intolerant.”

I responded that I did not call Trump or his supporters racists but said they promote or allow racism and misogyny. John told me, “He is an equal opportunity offender. The way he was so condescending to the other white male candidates for president, someone could say he is a racist against middle-aged white men.” I responded with a version of what I once saw black poet Claudia Rankine tell a white man asking her about reverse racism: “I have no power over you, so whatever I say to you or about you is not racism. Racism is about power.”

In the wake of the election, there was a rash of reflexive hate behaviour and hate crimes in Fayetteville, as in many places around the country. Someone shouted “Go back to Allah!” at one of my South Asian–American colleagues; another colleague received an email from a student of colour with the subject line “Excused Absence?” saying that she could not leave her dorm room because people outside it were taunting her. By Saturday, we had received a message from the chancellor affirming the university’s commitment to diversity, peace and freedom for scholarly pursuit; by Monday, a hotline had been created to report harassment and provide escorts to anyone feeling unsafe.

Because I am not Latino or Muslim, although I could be mistaken for either, the streets feel only marginally less safe to me than they did prior to November 8. (I suspect that for black Americans, it all feels exactly the same.) When I was a kid, in the suburbs of Edmonton, white kids told me to go back where I came from, waylaid me with racial taunts, egged our house. I never particularly thought of these as expressions of racism, because the bullying did not appear to me institutionally supported in the way that similar taunts against black children in the South were. I did not see structures holding me back, did not speculate until much later about the resentful conversations that might be happening in those houses.

Although I started feeling strange and anxious when Trump signs started appearing in my neighbourhood six months ago, all my personal experiences have remained as friendly as ever. The expressions of violence post election feel like a micro shift, certain people saying aloud what they said all along in private, although most Americans likely “aren’t that way”—that is, they do not say explicitly racist things in private, either.

In some ways, I prefer racism hidden. I believe all of us harbour some irrational fear of the other and some desire to protect our clan. It is only when those categorical fears are marshalled for oppression that it becomes incumbent on me to name and oppose them. This is one reason I do not call Trump supporters bigots, even while naming their actions or speeches as xenophobic or misogynist. I leave it to them to say who they are; I do not know their souls.

One of my graduate students, a white East Coast liberal male with Midwestern origins, came to talk to me last week. He was in obvious, near-physical pain, and quoted Jamelle Bouie, writing in Slate on Hurricane Katrina. Bouie says that this, not Barack Obama’s election, was “the most defining moment in black America’s relationship to its country.” My student said that he thought most white Americans never had such a moment. I wonder if this election will be that defining moment for young people like him. If so, it might be a kind of inverse of the Katrina effect: the moment for a painful shedding of a certain complacency that the Obama years, in particular, allowed; for an effort to see what can easily go unseen; for a full and proper recognition of the place they enjoy in America, and the blindness that accompanies it. A lot of young white people are shaking their heads and saying this was not the America they thought they were living in. In fact, for many Americans, it always was—as this election may have helped bring to light.

I suspect that Matthew had his moment at that parade when he was little. He grew up to become a city councillor, one who works on climate change initiatives and who helped to make Fayetteville the first municipality in Arkansas to pass an anti-discrimination bill.

Last week, a good friend, whose daughter is twelve, the same age as my son, posted on Facebook about being, in her words, “Trumped” by a business associate of her father’s when she was our kids’ age: “Left in the room alone with me for a brief moment, he came up behind me and grabbed me, pressed his full torso including his hips into my body, reached his arms around me and grabbed my developing breasts, pulling me into him hard.” She got away but did not tell anyone, full of shame and afraid she would not be believed. The election prompted her to go public with her story and tell her daughter that even if her president brags about doing such things, they are not okay. I, too, had a conversation with my son. I told him about a similar incident I had witnessed when I was his age, and said I was counting on him to stop such behaviour if he ever saw it. He came home the next day wearing a safety pin, given to him by a friend.

I am still having long email debates with my Christian friend, John. He has no fear of this administration, while I, as Trump chooses his cabinet, am pretty scared. Many of my friends would call John racist for not denouncing Trump, while I see him as a person trying to articulate his truths, based on some mixture of partial information, fundamental beliefs and personal experience—a person who operates much the way I do, in other words. I feel he ignores structural questions in favour of anecdote; I think he feels that I discount the sins of the left and magnify the sins of the right. He quoted Solzhenitsyn to me: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

I killed a spider last night, a brown recluse. Until I moved here, I had never heard of them, the only American spider, along with the black widow, whose venom is “medically significant.” If you are bitten and if you are sensitive to the toxin—both conditions are rare—a brown recluse bite can necrotize into a pit of rotting flesh, a dramatic and terrifying result. So, for our first years here, we were very afraid of them. Our house has these spiders from top to bottom, in every room. We have found them on ourselves and our children, for ten years, and as far as I know have never been bitten. So this one probably would not have hurt me, but it was in my house and I felt scared. I lifted a book—Maggie Nelson’s liberal-intellectual-LGBTQ classic The Argonauts—and smashed it. Which is to say that I admit there are limits to my hospitality and to my resources and to what I am willing to give.

I think I can listen hard to the other side, with curiosity and some amount of sympathy, but this, so far, has left my fundamental world views untouched. I think John might say the same. Still, while he and I appear to be on different sides of a very wide gulf, he is not pointing fingers, not talking about an “us” and a “them.” He wants to acknowledge that even the tribes that claim us contain a huge diversity of belief. While I feel I have no choice but to forgive many sins on the left, I also acknowledge that there are sins to forgive, complexities to my own positions and to those of my political allies.

Another student of mine, Bill, is a retired army intelligence officer who evacuated the Pentagon on 9/11. He now takes creative writing classes. When I spoke emotionally to my fiction workshop in the days after the election, he quoted a poet from Arkansas, C.D. Wright, formerly a student in our program: “We will have to meet irrational force with savage insight.”

I was skeptical: I know what Bill meant, because we are on the same side of all the big issues, but both sides of the cultural divide are saying such things. Bill is another bubble breaker, though: an old white guy, a career military man, who knows members of Trump’s close circle and calls them “scary.” He is writing letters, telling people in Washington to “put a picture of your grandkids on your desk, because that’s who you’re working for.” He is almost as circumspect as John: he does not pretend to know the future, although he checked the news on his phone at our break in class yesterday and said to me, “It’s going to be a long four years.”

We are girding ourselves, although the future seems to me only one item on a long list of things we cannot pretend to know. Perhaps we can spend these four long years trying better to know them.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/bubble-weary-in-trumps-america/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/bubble-weary-in-trumps-america/Can the Humanities Save Us?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/_j9pA-hpQ1M/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/can-the-humanities-save-us/#commentsTue, 22 Nov 2016 16:59:55 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12842In the shocked week after Americans elected Donald Trump their president, the beleaguered liberal arts received a shot in the arm. “Dear Artists: We Need You More Than Ever,” read a headline in the Huffington Post. An exhortation by American author Toni Morrison, beginning with “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity,” was passed around feverishly online.

It was a rare moment of optimism for the humanities, whose declining fortunes have been much lamented of late. Enrollment in programs has declined across the United States and Europe as students pursue professions such as engineering, law and medicine. Studies show earning gaps between graduates of programs of science, technology, engineering and mathematics—STEM—and those in the liberal arts. And business programs in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have emerged as the biggest competitor, beating both arts and science programs.

Still, as noted by Mélanie Frappier, a professor of humanities at the University of King’s College, at a recent Spur Festival panel in Halifax, surveys show employers are looking for “the kind of skills that are developed in liberal arts programs: to be able to engage diverse communities, to be able to write, be able to talk, to be able to critically engage in an interdisciplinary universe.” And recent political events everywhere have pointed to the humanities’ ongoing relevance.

Frappier was moderating a panel addressing the question of the crisis in the liberal arts, and their benefit to society. She was joined by panelists Laura Penny (Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit), prison activist Harry Critchley, journalist and performer Rita Shelton Deverell and Giller-shortlisted writer Alexander MacLeod. The following texts, presenting four diverse ways of exploring the humanities crisis, are adapted from the panelists’ remarks.

Laura Penny

Just One Word: Plastics

I get a little nervous when we start to talk about the liberal arts as though they’re kale, right?—something that’s good for you, that we should all eat. I’d make a slightly more modest case, which is that I think we are already seeing the results of denigrating the liberal arts, lo these past 20, 30 years in North America. We’re seeing that in more polarized public discourse and less of a common vocabulary. To quote the poet William Carlos Williams, it is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

I do want to underline that I think it’s absurd that we keep having these discussions about whether we can afford Shakespeare or not, when we are the wealthiest people who have ever trod the face of this poor, beleaguered planet. A lot of this poor-mouthing that comes up in the general vicinity of the humanities is, to me, not wholly believable. And a lot of it seems to be ideologically motivated.

And, of course, the question of collective priorities is a little different from the question of what you tell the students who fear that following their interest in the humanities will leave them unemployed and living under an overpass. This is harder. The first thing I would say is that we are incredibly bad at predicting what we will need in five, ten, 15, 20 years. And that anyone who makes confident claims about this is full of codswallop. Or they are trying to sell something—a particular program.

These very predictions can become self-­defeating prophecies. For example, there is currently a glut of pharmacists in America. I mean, what career can you think of that seems more secure than giving people drugs they crave? But the fact of the matter is that years of telling people “this is a sure-fire bet, go be a pharmacist” is why you end up with too many pharmacists. Ross Finnie at the University of Ottawa has been doing excellent work tracking employment rates and salaries of graduates in a variety of fields, using Statistics Canada data and tax returns. He has found that grads in the humanities and social sciences have relatively low rates of unemployment, tend to have starting salaries in the $30,000 to $40,000 range and within ten years are making $70,000 to $80,000. So, sure, engineers may indeed make more. But they won’t if everybody tries to become an engineer.

I also find it a little disingenuous to blame people’s majors for their employment situation. The less than stellar prospects our young people face have a lot more to do with globalization, with the rise of contract work, with the decline of unions, with the boomers’ policy demands—sorry, boomers, education was cheap when you needed it. Now hips are free when you need them. That’s okay—that’s what people vote like.

The other thing is that a lot of this talk is about a job market that doesn’t exist anymore. You’re not going to graduate from whatever degree you take, go to Imperial Widgets, put in your 50 years at the factory, retire with a gold watch and then collect a pension. I don’t know what’s coming. You could be working on a bullet farm in a Mad Max world for all I know.

A lot of the things that we want to blame on the liberal arts, that we want to think of as a crisis in the university system, actually have to do with intergenerational inequality. Hopefully the humanities give us a civilized way to think about that. And I actually think that it’s a lot of ideas from business schools that have gotten us into this mess, and it’s going to be up to the sciences and the liberal arts to get us out of it.

Laura Penny is a professor of contemporary and early modern studies at the University of King’s College. She is the author of Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth about Bullshit (McClelland and Stewart, 2005) and More Money Than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College Is Crap and Idiots Think They’re Right (McClelland and Stewart, 2010).

Harry Critchley

Behind Closed Doors

A much smarter man than I once told me that education, particularly education in the liberal arts, represents an opportunity for people to come together in dialogue, to learn to know, love and live fully within the world. That has always stuck with me. But what I want to talk about is the opposite of that. It is the profound suffering and alienation experienced by people who feel cut off from or hurt by the world, and for whom there is no possibility of anything like the type of dialogue that we celebrate at universities across the country.

I’m the founder and director of the Burnside Prison Education Program, one of two university-affiliated correctional education programs in the country. We offer about 12 to 15 courses a year in the arts and social sciences for men and women at the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility, in Burnside, in north Dartmouth. All our instructors are faculty and PhD students in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. We are also working with the Department of Justice and Literacy Nova Scotia to develop a literacy tutoring program for the large numbers of men and women who are incarcerated in this province with very limited reading skills.

Angela Davis, the American prison abolitionist, writes that prisons are intimately tied up with and yet fundamentally disconnected from our day-to-day lives. We take them for granted, as a sort of grim yet necessary control mechanism on society, but we are often afraid to face the realities that they produce.

We can’t continue on this track, though. Canadian society has been ravaged for over a decade by draconian, tough-on-crime policies, with a dramatic increase in the overall prison growth in Canada, of 14 percent in the last decade, and record high incarceration rates among indigenous people, women and African Canadians. The politics of mass incarceration threaten to undermine the very possibility that our world can be something that we share together, the conditions in which it can be a common world.

However, despite all this, I still believe that we can reconstitute a common world. It is possible. And that the liberal arts can—and perhaps must—play a role in this. Last year, we offered a seminar on Sophocles’s Philoctetes, with Eli Diamond, from Dalhousie’s Classics Department. The play tells the story of a Greek archer, who, en route to Troy, is abandoned by his comrades on a deserted island after contracting a terrible illness. During our discussion of the play, one of the older men asked to read this passage that had resonated with him:

This man was born nobility, / From a house second to none. / Now he has lost everything. / Alone without a friend in the world, / Living among the beasts in the wilds— / Miserable, hungry and desperate, / Suffering incurable, endless agony. / The only answer to his hopeless cries is the perpetual call of Echo, / Far, far away in the distance.

Afterward, that man commented, “That is us. He could be describing life in here.” Many of the other students—and these were all men in what is perhaps the most hyper masculine, toxically masculine environment in our society—said the same thing. This is a radical, life-denying skepticism that is reflected in the rocky crags and the barren landscape of Philoctetes’s island prison. The fluorescent lights, the stale air and the very walls of our own prisons here in Canada likewise seem haunted by a deep and often times suffocating sadness.

Despite the daily realities of overcrowding in our prison system, and even double bunking in segregation cells, this sadness can and often does harden into an overwhelming sense of isolation.

Reforming our public perceptions about prisons means changing how we think about the people in prison. It means affording them the basic dignity and respect that Hannah Arendt calls the right to have rights: the right to appear and to be counted as one among many, and to have one’s thoughts and opinions recognized as meaningful and valuable. When ten men in orange jumpsuits shuffle into a cramped room to discuss Homer’s Odyssey or a poem by Audre Lorde or an article by Judith Butler, each reveals aspects of the world that the others could not have imagined.

A lot of men and women I work with have never had a positive experience with formal education in their life. They were always told, “This is not for you.” So when I bring a university professor in, who says “I’m really interested in your opinion,” that can be a tremendously positive experience. When I come to you and I take you seriously, you take your own opinion seriously. You apply a rigour to that.

In the United States there are 150 university-affiliated correctional education programs. Princeton has one, Columbia has one, Harvard has one. The biggest is at a place called Bard College in upstate New York, like a liberal arts college fancy dream. They graduate 400 people a year; they’ve been around 15 years. And they have a 0.08 percent recidivism rate. The recidivism rate in New York State is 75 percent. So give people a chance.

Though often extremely painful, the kind of revelation I’m talking about here, the kind of revelation that is facilitated by the liberal arts and open discussion is vital if we are going to affirm and love the world in the fullness of its joys and sorrows.

Harry Critchley is the outreach community coordinator for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University, and founder and director of the Burnside Prison Education Program.

Rita Shelton Deverell

Just What Is Work?

I’m not sure that liberal arts can save society, but I am sure that the liberal arts saved me. I was born in Houston Negro Hospital in 1945. As I sometimes say, for the record, I have been black and a woman ever since. The earliest profession that I thought I wanted to have was to be an actor. I did everything that a child through high school could do to bring that about. And I wanted to go to a theatre school. My parents, who were extremely wise people, said, “No, no, no, you’re not going to do that. We will only pay for a good bachelor’s degree.” So I indeed did go to Adelphi University on Long Island, and I was able to get an acting scholarship.

But after I got to the university, majoring in drama, I thought, “This is really stupid. The thing I know the most about is the theatre, and I know almost nothing about things that universities are really good at.” So I changed my major and I got a BA in philosophy three years later. I remember my father being terribly puzzled about this change. He said, “What do philosophers do?” I said they are lovers of wisdom.

I had gone to segregated schools in Texas to the end of high school. I was in no way prepared to study philosophy in a liberal arts university. But I clawed my way to a fairly decent average, and by the time I graduated I knew a lot more. So then I decided that I was going to take a degree that would be even more useless. I decided that the basis of the arts was religion. So I would get a degree in the history of religion. I went to Columbia University and the Union Theological Seminary and got an MA.

By the time I finished the thesis, I had immigrated to Canada and I realized that I was totally unemployable. It was quite a culture shock to move from Manhattan to St. Thomas, Ontario. I’m in a new country and my life is a mess, but I’ve got these arts jobs put together. We’re talking 1968. Fanshawe College hired me to teach extension courses in the history of religions. I’m 25 years—no, I’m not even that old, and all of these very mature people, mainly farmers, are taking these courses, and we are having a wonderful time.

I did that, and I did arts therapy with disturbed children. I found a very adventuresome major at a Salvation Army children’s centre, who hired me to work in music and drama and movement with these children, and James Reaney, who was at the University of Western Ontario, got me to work in his theatre centre. So now I had a job!

Then lots of years go along and I’m doing this and that, and I get this horrible boss at CBC Saskatchewan. I think I’ve got to quit this job, and I would like to do something more socially acceptable than say I am quitting because you are an idiot. So I decided to go to graduate school. And I applied to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

What this strange education did, and I realize that I have used it every day of my adult life, is teach me flexibility in what I thought of as work and how I could work. And it gave me confidence that I could learn a new body of material relatively quickly, which, for a broadcaster, is a wonderful skill. That, in fact, is the main skill I got out of my doctoral degree.

I’ve been doing a fair amount of mentoring over the last number of years, and it frequently has to do with refocusing what it is I know how to do that makes me employable. When I came out of school and there was no place for me to work, I learned a very valuable lesson in how to match myself up with work. And this was in the good old days. It was just that I hadn’t made any kind of bridges between what I knew how to do and what some people out there could want.

It’s not the sciences or the organized professions that are the opposition. I think that the opposition to the liberal arts is a fundamentalist education. Memorizing stuff, wherever you do it and however you do it, is a fundamentalist education, and it’s only by having a diversity of perspectives to be able to see multiple realities that we break through the problems of a fundamentalist education.

Rita Shelton Deverell is a broadcast journalist, playwright, performer and activist and one of the founders of VisionTV, the world’s first multi-faith and multicultural network.

Alexander MacLeod

Think Outside the Book

I teach reading books and writing books. It’s a curious job to have. When you teach the reading of books, there is an assumption that the book has a message to deliver to you, and that by educating yourself as a careful reader you will somehow receive this message. Reading in some fundamental way is posited as a decoding of messages. Talented readers, we are told, get more messages than untalented readers. Oh, you can’t read that book. The messages that book is sending you shall never receive. If you yourself believe you are a talented reader, put that on the pegboard for a second.

Last year I read all the books for the Giller Prize. What was amazing was the consistency of the message. There were about nine things you could say, about 29 you couldn’t.

I also spend a lot of time with writers. Do you know the person that writers hate? They don’t like to talk about readers. In my workshop I stand up for the reader. I say, what about the reader, my friend? Because most writers are dramatically interested in the messages they are sending. Are these messages to be received? Are such messages to be sent? These are questions that seem distant. If you bring them up, it’s rude.

If you spend all your day with people who think they are sending messages and people who think they are receiving messages, you start to get a very problematic understanding of reading—as the Beastie Boys say, “ill communication.” We’ve got some ill communication here.

My deep sadness about our contemporary period is that I don’t think that the liberal arts are in crisis at all. I think that society is in crisis, because the medium through which these messages are to be sent is profoundly corrupted. We have all put ourselves in these ­creative-writing echo chambers where I only get the messages I want to get, and I only send the messages that I want to send.

My second problem with the liberal arts is that I have a big problem with liberalism, a notion of individual, purely individual rights and freedoms, as if you could construct a mechanism of community and communication off such an intellectual framework. We see on the basis of arguments of intellectual freedom the exact basis to reject messages you don’t want to receive, which is a direct challenge to reading or interpretation at its most basic level.

Last year I had to read all the books for the Giller Prize. There were 168 novels published by Canadians. It was amazing. But what was mostly amazing about it was the incredible consistency of the message. And the consistency of how it was delivered. There were about nine things you could say, about 29 things you couldn’t say. And I too worked in the prisons in the Northwest Territories and neither are books sent there, nor do they come from there. So I say to my own students sometimes: What are your fundamentalisms? And if you really believe that someone could have a thesis and present that argument with careful evidence and then you would be convinced—but you have nine things that you could never be convinced of—how are you any different from the people that you polarize and hate so much? So the crisis in the liberal arts is definitely there. But that’s different from a crisis in communication and in community and in a way that we can close ourselves.

I was in China recently. There is a partnership between St. Mary’s University and Beijing Normal University, and there was a student who was coming to Canada, and she said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be okay in Canada,” because she had seen all these pictures of the mountains. She said, “This is all I like to do: I go to school, and I come home, and I want to get ice cream, and I want to sit with my laptop”—she didn’t have the right word—“and I just want to starving watch my shows and eat ice cream.” And she said, “Does anybody ever do that in Canada?”

She was very sad. She just said, “I’m just going to be so lonesome.” And the Canadian kids literally started laughing. To me, this becomes really important. Because that’s the image I think all humanities scholars should think about: the starving person. And if you’ve ever binge watched, where you’re like, “I need more, it’s two o’clock in the morning, this is going to cost me tomorrow, this is bad, I shouldn’t be doing it”—that precise kind of hunger, that precise desire, is connective tissue. You go to America, all these people who hate each other, they’re all eating ice cream and binge watching exactly the same way. There really is something powerful about this longing to be in the story or to understand the story or to get that power of story out of art.

She was so sad. She thought she would be the loneliest person in Canada, and it was going to be horrible. And then someone turned to her and said, “If you do that in your residence room, you will be like every single other person in the residence room. Everybody will be doing that.” And then she was like, “With the ice cream?” “With the ice cream.” It was this glorious moment, which seems like it’s nothing. Except that it’s everything. That desire is just like the thing that makes Sophocles work in 2016.

Alexander MacLeod is a professor of English and Atlantic Canada studies at St. Mary’s University. His short story collection, Light Lifting (Biblioasis, 2010), was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award, the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/can-the-humanities-save-us/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/can-the-humanities-save-us/The Logroller’s Waltzhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/l8AjD7aMCYQ/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-logrollers-waltz/#commentsFri, 11 Nov 2016 21:04:51 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12813In the summer of 2010 advance reading copies of the English translation of the Israeli author David Grossman’s acclaimed novel To the End of the Land began making the proverbial rounds. The publisher was hoping to secure pre-release blurbs—those words of lavish, unrestrained praise meant to suggest that, yes, this is a book worth buying. In this case, the de rigueur gushiness bubbled into sticky self-parody, thanks to a particularly effusive appraisal from the novelist Nicole Krauss:

Very rarely, a few times in a lifetime you open a book and when you close it again nothing can ever be the same. Walls have been pulled down, barriers broken, a dimension of feeling, of existence itself, has opened in you that was not there before. To the End of the Land is a book of this magnitude. David Grossman may be the most gifted writer I’ve ever read; gifted not just because of his imagination, his energy, his originality, but because he has access to the unutterable, because he can look inside a person and discover the unique essence of her humanity.

Hyperbole begat further hyperbole. The CBC called the evaluation “a book blurb for the ages.” The now-defunct gossip website Gawker was harsher, calling it “the most obsequious blurb to ever grace a book cover.” The Guardian held a contest encouraging readers to “outblurb” Krauss by offering their own appraisals of Dan Brown’s airport-fiction classic The Da Vinci Code. One particularly hilarious response: “By reading this book I was once again bathed in the warm [sic] of my mother’s effluvium and slid from the unforgiving crimson womb into a beautiful blue fluorescent world, and then slapped, shaken, and suckled to life by the teat of Brown’s literary genius.”

The Krauss blurb attracted attention rivalling that afforded to Grossman’s novel. And that was likely the point. There was a sense Krauss was leveraging the blurb to burnish her own reputation—as if the act of blurbing were itself a kind of writing assignment, designed to establish the overflowing generosity and ebullience of the reviewer. “It’s hard to take seriously,” observed Brian Bethune, a senior writer and books columnist at Maclean’s magazine. “That blurb sounds like it should be completed by the statement ‘and I have retired from writing.’”

Blurbing is a long-established form of “logrolling,” as Bethune puts it, the sometimes-sycophantic process by which different individuals promote one another’s efforts. It can be a matter of old-fashioned Canadian politeness (i.e., you do not want to annoy an author you may be plopped beside at a forthcoming literary gala) as much as shrewd careerism—both good politics and smart business, in other words. “It’s so small in Canada,” says Bethune. “One year you’re on the jury for the Governor General’s Award and your friend is up for the prize. And two years later it’s your book that’s nominated and that same friend is on the jury.”

The history of the lit-blurb is as marked by incipient enthusiasm as it is by skepticism at the sometimes out-and-out sycophancy. For George Orwell, the mutual admiration society of blurbers had a net negative effect on literary culture as a whole. In his 1936 essay “In Defence of the Novel,” Orwell maintained that “the novel is being shouted out of existence” in part because of “the disgusting tripe that is written by the blurb-reviewers.” He went on, mocking the hyperbole that has long been endemic among such blurbers: “Novels are being shot at you at the rate of fifteen a day, and every one of them an unforgettable masterpiece which you imperil your soul by missing. It must make it so difficult to choose a book at the library, and you must feel so guilty when you fail to shriek with delight … When all novels are thrust upon you as words of genius, it is quite natural to assume that all of them are tripe.”

Orwell recognized such enthusiasms as a kind of devalued currency, falsely inflating the perceived value of books and feeding a ballooning economy of the blurb. One may have expected a blurb-onomic slump after Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: the blurb-as-book-title, collapsing marketing and writing into some sly amalgam. But still, some 80 years after Orwell decried the whole enterprise, the bubble has yet to burst. Yet if every book is masterpiece, if any sufficiently blurbed debut can blast open those new dimensions of feelings raved about by Krauss, how can the average reader be expected to keep abreast of them all?

In the Canadian publishing ecosystem—or microcosm—such lavish blurbs pop up less regularly. Mark Medley, books editor of TheGlobe and Mail, recalls cases of prospective critics who hoped that writing and reviewing would catch the attention of publishers, and perhaps lead to a fruitful career as an author. But he does not notice much in the way of Krauss-level gushing. And when he does happen across such pointed, declarative enthusiasms, he tends to stand by them. “If someone’s going to call something ‘the best book of the year,’ who am I?” says Medley. “I’ve assigned them the book for a reason. I trust them. I’m not going to tamp down their enthusiasm.”

Orwell recognized such enthusiasms as a kind of devalued currency, falsely inflating the perceived value of books and feeding a ballooning economy of the blurb.

Occasionally a reader of books sections can happen across laudatory phrases tucked into a review that hew so closely to the rhythm of a blurb that it may be tempting to think they were planted there for later plucking for the book’s paperback edition. But this is likely sheer accident (or conspiratorial thinking on the part of said reader) rather than premeditation, in the view of Emily Keeler, a former books editor at the National Post, who now edits the Exploded Views imprint at Coach House Books. “I think most reviewers I worked with would pride themselves a bit on being too hard to cut down to a blurb,” says Keeler. “The few people I edited with phrases like that, I don’t know that they were aiming to be blurbed so much as they were getting trapped on the laziest path to writing a review.”

As a book columnist, I am inclined to agree with Keeler’s sentiment. I take a certain obstinate pride in being un-blurbable. Still, they manage. One of only two blurbs I have had published was extracted from a review of Anton Corbijn’s espionage thriller film A Most Wanted Man. (It contained two subclauses and an em-dash.) It is commonplace for publishers to generously—and whimsically—cull blurbs from reviews, cherry-picking key lines and phrases. “Someone may write, ‘This is a tremendous new book on the subject, if it was handled smartly.’ They’ll just ditch that last part,” says Bethune. Mark Medley at the Globe sees a similar trend. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve published a negative review of a book and see it hacked up—a word here, a word there—and see it slapped on the paperback, as if it came from a rave review.” (In a recent piece for The Walrus, writer Jason Guriel explained how his recent pan of a new Anne Carson book was spun into publicity, thanks to the handiwork of “some collagist” at publisher Random House.)

Then there is the thorny matter of pre-release blurbs. The late conservative pundit William F. Buckley once claimed that he was provided with templates for such coverage, although such chicanery is more difficult to account for these days. (If it were common, one would it expect that such malfeasant laziness would be expediently exposed online.) Today, it is more common for big-name novelists such as Lee Child or Stephen King to simply lend their names as a nod of approval to up-and-coming authors. In a 2008 edition of his old Entertainment Weekly column, King lamented the “hyperbolic ecstasies” of blurbing while simultaneously expressing the belief that such pithy enthusiasms prove more effective at marshalling potential audiences than, say, a long-form book review. King claimed he blurbed in order to repay a karmic debt, as his early books such as Carrie, Salem’s Lot and The Shining “were published before the art of blurbing had been perfected.” (Perhaps King should bone up on his Orwell?)

“Blurbs are like dog whistles for people in the know,” says Medley. “If you’re a debut writer and you have Stephen King and James Patterson blurbs, you’re announcing that you’re a commercial writer, and maybe they’ll turn your book into a movie.” In this sense, blurbs are—to use the parlance of online streaming services like Netflix and Spotify—the original recommendation algorithm. If you like Stephen King, you may like Nick Cutter, a.k.a. Craig Davidson, an author hailed by the Globe as “Canada’s new king of horror fiction.”

There is also a case to be made for writers who blurb to draw attention to important issues. Take one of Canada’s most prolific blurbers, the celebrated part-Métis novelist Joseph Boyden, whose words of praise have won attention for up-and-coming indigenous writers. “You don’t want to damn him,” says Maclean’s Bethune. “Because he has a cause. And it’s a high-level cause. He’s trying to drive awareness to Native issues.”

But, for most authors perusing advance review copies and offering pre-release buzz, the process can feel tiresome. “No one likes blurbs. No. One,” says Sarah Weinman, author, journalist and editor of the Library of America’s new two-volume set, Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s and Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s. “It’s anxiety provoking and time consuming and everyone is aware that the blurber and blurbee are probably connected via an editor, an agent, an MFA program or are friends, or some other combination.”

The exception to Weinman’s rule may be books section editors and booksellers. For editors, blurbs from writers who may not be household names help to distinguish titles amid the flow of hundreds of books that come in on a weekly basis. Likewise, for booksellers, these recommendations help give a sense of a title’s prospective audience, and how it may fare in the market.

As for readers, many have gone from looking at book jackets to the hobbyists online offering their own hyperbolic ecstasies on Amazon or Goodreads. Forget the hoary old book reviewers, with their exacting tastes and seven-dollar words! These reviews come gratis, courtesy of other consumers of literature. Consider Amazon’s top-ranked reviewer “iiiireader,” who has weighed in on some 4,680 Amazon titles, from mystery novels to Star Wars adult colouring books to a DVD of a Hallmark Channel movie called Murder, She Baked: A Chocolate Chip Murder Mystery (“As I have not read the books in the series, I cannot say whether or not the movie stays true to the book,” iiiireader notes in her review). On her blog iiiireader clarifies that she is not being paid by Amazon or affiliates for her impressive body of free work. “I am not receiving any form of compensation,” she writes. “I enjoy the hobby and want to help others make informed purchase decisions.”

Existing outside the culture of professional logrolling and favour swapping—also endemic on social media websites like Twitter, where critics and reviewers fawn over one another in a nauseating game of sycophantic one-upmanship—user reviews offer a revision of the recommendation algorithm analogy. Instead of, “You may like this if you like that,” user reviews offer a more intimate formulation: “You may like this if you are like me.” Such blurbs make those ecstasies and enthusiasms less professional and more immediate, even personal. They encourage readers to connect on the level of shared taste, stopping just short of the opportunity to look inside a person and perhaps even discover the unique essence of his or her humanity.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-logrollers-waltz/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/12/the-logrollers-waltz/The Shadow of the Shoahhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/9-fOibOXL4Y/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/11/the-shadow-of-the-shoah/#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2016 03:31:17 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12711More than 70 years after the end of the Second World War, the shadow cast by the Shoah lingers. Monographs, memoirs and occasional diaries continue to appear, as some who lived and suffered through those years are speaking up at last as they approach the end of what are by now long lives. We may assume that not many more of these will be published—the survivors are now in their eighties and nineties—yet their stories are needed more than ever. Not only do they shed light on a sui generis tragedy in recent history, but they are also a cautionary tale for the present day, when anti-Semitism is on the rise and hostility toward other minority groups is mounting.

Two such memoirs by Canadians have appeared recently. The lives of both Max Eisen and Eric Koch were greatly changed by the Nazi war against the Jews, but their experiences were very different. Eisen’s book, By Chance Alone: A Remarkable True Story of Courage and Survival at Auschwitz, although it deals at length with his life in Czechoslovakia and Hungary in the 1930s and ’40s, is essentially a concentration camp survival story. Koch’s account, Otto and Daria: A Wartime Journey Through No Man’s Land, deals with the experiences of a relatively privileged family who managed to escape Nazi Germany, and its primary focus is on the author’s life as a wartime “enemy alien” internee in Canada.

Of the two memoirs, Koch’s is the more engaging. Not hung up on chronology, and often ­digressing into fascinating, sometimes irrelevant byways, it reads somewhat like an elegant and quirky novel. Eric Koch, known as Otto for the first 23 years of his life, was born into a secular Jewish family in Frankfurt. Owners of a fashionable jewellery store run by an uncle after Koch’s father died in 1919, the Kochs belonged to the affluent bourgeoisie. That meant little after the Nazis entered office in 1933, and four years later the family was preparing to leave Germany. Eric, who was already studying in England, entered St. John’s College, Cambridge.

Memoirs are by definition an expression of memory, and memory is not history. Memory is highly prone to being reshaped by later events.

He was there when war broke out in 1939 and had to register as an enemy alien. He was placed in category C, a group consisting mainly of Jews and political refugees who were deemed to be no threat. That status ended one day after the government changed on May 11, 1940. Wishing to reassure a frightened and largely ignorant public that everything possible was being done to counter the German threat, the new government led by Winston Churchill ordered the internment of all male enemy aliens whatever their category (the women were presumably not dangerous).

This was inappropriate action of the kind identified by Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes, Minister fame: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” For Koch it had the unexpected result that he, along with many other internees, was soon sent to Canada for safekeeping, as it were. He appreciates the irony in this: the Jews among them would hardly have obtained admission to Canada in any other way, for Canadian government policy, as Irving Abella and Harold Troper have shown, was hostile to Jewish refugees.

Koch spent 18 months confined in internment camps in Quebec before the British government relaxed its policy on enemy aliens, and those who could find a sponsor could leave the camps. Koch’s connection to the jewellery business did the trick: his sponsors were Colonel Gerald Birks, one of the principals in Henry Birks and Sons, and his wife, Phyllis. He changed his name to Eric, studied law at the University of Toronto, briefly taught French at Appleby College, and then, after meeting Saturday Night’s B.K. Sandwell, turned to journalism. Soon afterward, he joined the CBC International Service, in time becoming a fixture in CBC radio and ­television.

Koch’s story is, on the whole, an upbeat one. The only near relative he lost in the Shoah was a grandmother who died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. Aided at times by family connections, at other times by friends, he landed on his feet. The same cannot be said about the Daria in the book’s title, whose letters to Koch form a sort of counterpoint to his memoir. Koch met Daria Hambourg, the daughter of a well-established London family, in Switzerland in 1938, and they corresponded for five years. Their last contact was in November 1943; she died in 1992.

None of Koch’s letters to Hambourg survived, and so the letters are a one-way conversation that Koch does not quite manage to integrate successfully with his own story. However, the slice of life that he serves up is enjoyable. He does seem a bit too quick to drop names, even when it is inappropriate. (Confiding the name of a woman with whom he enjoyed a one-night stand in 1940 adds nothing to his story.) Nevertheless, his tale is well written, often playful, good humoured and worth reading.

A clearer counterpoint to Koch’s story is found in Max Eisen’s, which is also well worth reading, even if his telling of it is not elegant. Eisen was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in a part of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hungary after the 1938 Munich agreement. Hungary, allied with Germany, was led by Admiral Miklós Horthy, whose government, although anti-Semitic, long resisted the Nazis’ Final Solution. In 1944, the Germans forced Horthy to appoint a new prime minister, the fanatically pro-German and anti-Semitic Döme Sztójay. The last remaining large group of European Jews thereby came into mortal danger.

Eisen recalls that after the first Passover seder in 1944, a gentile neighbour came to warn them and help them escape, but Eisen’s grandfather held it to be wrong to travel during Passover. The following morning, local police took them into custody, and three weeks later young Max (then called Tibor), his grandparents, parents, aunt and uncle, and three younger siblings, were loaded into cattle cars and sent to Auschwitz.

Most of the Eisens were selected for immediate extermination in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, while Max, his father and uncle were assigned to Auschwitz I, a labour camp. The three men were assigned to do agricultural work, hard physical labour on inadequate rations of food. In July, his father and uncle were removed for no apparent reason; years later, he learned that they had been earmarked for medical experiments. Not yet 16, he was left alone in the world with slim odds of survival.

That he did survive was due to an improbable combination of circumstances. It is not for nothing that Eisen titled his memoir By Chance Alone. He lucked into the position of assistant to the Polish camp doctor, which gave him a few privileges such as improved access to food. But that was not enough to keep him alive when the Germans abandoned Auschwitz in January 1945, and sent the inmates westward, on foot and sometimes by train. Eisen must have been blessed with an iron constitution, for he survived this long ordeal, and was finally liberated on May 6, 1945, by the U.S. 761st Tank Battalion near Melk in Austria. Eisen emigrated to Canada in 1949 and got married in Toronto three years later. He established a successful business and seems to have dwelt little on the past until he retired in 1988. Then he remembered his father’s injunction when they last saw each other: “If you survive, you must tell the world what happened here.” This prompted him to become a Holocaust speaker and to accompany tours to Auschwitz.

Did his father say those very words, or did Eisen conjure them up when, more than 40 years later, he started thinking about his experiences? I doubt it matters. Memoirs are by definition an expression of memory, and memory is not history. Memory is highly prone to being reshaped by later events, so that memoirs dealing with concentration camp life and death have been influenced by subsequent events and by knowledge gained from other sources. The passage of time also has the effect of highlighting some events and softening others. Memoirs have value, but they do differ from diaries, which are more immediate in what they record.

Diaries are unfiltered and intense, not only because of the subject matter but also because they are typically not intended for publication. A few years ago I was asked by the historian Robert Jan van Pelt to translate the diary that a young Dutch Jew, David Koker, kept in Vught, the only concentration camp the Germans established in the Netherlands—the better-known Westerbork was a transit camp for Jews. Reading it, I was struck by the horror of what he described. Against my expectations, however, I realized that even people who were living under the dire threat of deportation managed to find something like joy in their lives. That diary enabled me to enter into the world of a concentration camp in a way no memoir has been able to do.

But narrative reminders of the Shoah, whatever their genre, are invaluable to us, and they are all the more necessary now. As I was writing this review, I read Dow Marmur’s column in the Toronto Star about efforts in Poland to suppress “evidence of Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities against the Jews.” Hungary’s right-wing Jobbik party, which in the 2014 parliamentary election got the support of one fifth of the voters, is widely regarded as anti-Semitic. And Belgium and France have seen anti-Jewish hate crimes committed. It is sobering to realize that a half century of awareness of the grim reality of the Shoah has not helped to eliminate anti-Semitism from the world.

]]>http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/11/the-shadow-of-the-shoah/feed/0http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/11/the-shadow-of-the-shoah/The Mythical Indigenous Protagonisthttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/reviewcanada/~3/7gF9vZBjWko/
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2016/11/the-mythical-indigenous-protagonist/#commentsFri, 04 Nov 2016 03:31:12 +0000Literary Review of Canadahttp://reviewcanada.ca/?post_type=periodically_article&p=12702“Moving is the only hope,” a media presence who really should remain nameless recently said of a troubled Northern Ontario community. A predictable settler solution, to which the author and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor provides the best response: “Social malaise doesn’t come with a street address,” he says. “It comes with history.”

How did we come to accept the street-address view, which has an undeniable pedigree in this country? Historically, settler literature, from James Fenimore Cooper to John Richardson, has portrayed pre-contact land as empty, treacherous and hostile toward those who seek to conquer and civilize it. As the scholar and author Margery Fee points out, this narrative of an unforgiving “no man’s land” contributed to and even heroized the settlement of Canada. Stories are powerful and pervasive, and this narrative persists today.

It is not confined to the realm of historical writing. As readers, we are missing the point on a grand scale if we do not take into account the politics of land in indigenous fiction. In the work of Métis poet and author Katherena Vermette, this manifests as an exploration of indigenous characters in urban neighbourhoods.

Vermette’s view of urban life was powerfully articulated in North End Love Songs, a collection of poetry that acknowledges her complicated relationship with Winnipeg’s North End. Vermette grew up in this neighbourhood in the late 1980s and early ’90s and still considers it her home—warts and all. Winnipeg activist and co-founder of Red Rising Magazine Lenard Monkman speaks of his experience growing up in the North End: “During my teenage years and for a good majority of my 20s … you’d always leave the house on alert, always watching out in case. I think that’s just part of the way it is growing up in the inner city.”

The land we grow up on is home, and home, as anyone who grew up on the proverbial wrong side of the tracks knows, is more than a collection of hostile statistics and news stories. It is your community. In The Break, her stunning debut novel, Vermette revisits the North End, still choosing her words with a poet’s precision. She takes on the unruly task of weaving ten narrative voices, most of them female. A family tree at the book’s beginning proves useful. But before we meet any of them, we meet the land.

The Break, we are told by an unseen narrator, is a section of undeveloped territory “just west of McPhillips Street.” “Hydro land” is the designation given to this space, as the narrator says: “likely set aside in the days before anything was out there. When all that low land on the west side of the Red River was only tall grasses and rabbits.” The Break is defined in settler terms—land as empty and valueless until validated by electricity. In an equally poignant and pithy history lesson, we learn how distribution of land in the North End of the city shaped the rights of its residents: “That was when you had to own a certain amount of land to vote, and all those lots were made just inches smaller,” the narrator says of the property around the Break.

For Stella, a Métis woman who gave the Break its name, “if only in her head,” this land parallels an internal fracture. Grief over the unresolved loss of her mother has slowly colonized Stella, causing her to retreat from her family. She feels the loss most acutely in the break from her Kookom, who raised her while her mother battled addiction.

Although hoping to escape her pain by moving to the “better side of McPhillips,” as an optimistic real estate agent says, and through her daily responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, Stella instead finds herself in a frozen state. The story begins when she witnesses a violent sexual assault unfold in the Break through her window one evening and does little more than call the police. She chooses to attend to her crying children, leaving the victim to fend for herself. When she learns that the victim was a family member, the effects of severing ties with her family become clear.

A support structure built away from her community, dependent on a new life with her non-­indigenous husband and their kids, turns out to have its drawbacks. Stella appears as a passive, even selfish character at times, but make no mistake, every woman in this book is actively working to survive.

There is much media talk of indigenous resilience as if it is an otherworldly cultural gift.

Whether or not a broken bone heals harder, as the adage goes, the women in The Break constantly seek to harden themselves against the challenges they face, with varying degrees of success. This reality is exhausting, and makes it difficult for them to do anything other than survive. Cheryl, Stella’s aunty, drinks more than she would like to, and smokes like a chimney, “loving the dirty smoke in her throat.” Her friend Rita often defaults to hostility as a means of self-protection. Stella’s cousin Louisa, a social worker, struggles to keep it together for both family and clients after her partner abandons her.

I look at my files, all the poor, young children already with epic stories, their mothers mean or sad. The empty space where their fathers are supposed to be … I can’t seem to be a social worker right now, I think. I can only be a left woman.

I am trying to feel it. Like if I can just feel it then I can describe it, give it a name and a label and then deal with it … I am trying to fight back the tears because I don’t want to cry here, not at work where I am supposed to be hard and unemotional, but I can’t. I look up to the pictures pinned to my corkboard—my two boys, my family, my man—they all blur too.

In both The Break and North End Love Songs, families gather strength from each other, but their connection to the land is never out of the picture. In her poetry, Vermette makes this link through metaphor, comparing aunties and uncles to trees, and invoking the currents of the Red River:

those ones she can
climb into
lean against
the strong dark bark
rest her small body
within their round arms
their sharp leaves
reach out over the river

she watches how
the waves fold
into each other
like family

While the older generation is imbued with the hardiness of an elm, the youth, delicate and resilient, possess bird-like attributes “poised for flight / one small foot / on the curb.”

In The Break, this seems truest for the female characters. The support structures built by these women to maintain each other can sometimes exclude men, even “good men,” from the picture. Since she cannot reconcile her fierce independence with her vulnerability, Louisa finds herself with a kind and loving partner whom she cannot fully trust. She knows this is one of the reasons for his departure: “maybe he’s gone forever, like I always thought he would be. Sick of me and all my bullshit. Sick of my never giving him what he wants. I don’t blame him. I’m pretty sick of me too.”

Vermette has placed most of her protagonists at the nucleus of their familial support structures because this is indeed a role women play. And one of the critical responses to the book has been to marvel at the strength and resilience of its women. While accurate, this response is problematic in its superficiality. Although there is much media talk of indigenous resilience as if it is an otherworldly cultural gift, it in fact takes significant daily maintenance. It is precisely this effort that Vermette focuses on—countless moments marked by a blinking back of tears and a hardening of the jaw. The persistent anxiety about speaking out at times when simply having a voice may be dangerous. To leave these moments unacknowledged is to relegate indigenous women to the mythical realm—the noble and long-suffering Pocahontas. It ignores the socio-political underpinnings that create the need for such strength.

And what happens when strength reaches its limits? When sisters cannot be there for each other, or mothers are not there for their children? The Break explores the idea in a novelistic context. Nowhere in this book are the limits of resilience stretched more thin than with the character of Phoenix. She possesses a brutality that shocks the women of the older generation. Besides devastating violence, her actions signify a direct threat to the protective, female-focused support network they have counted on for generations. But Phoenix is a product of her environment—she cannot count on her mother, who is consumed by her own suffering. Like Louisa, Phoenix is also hardening herself to face the world, but without role models the results are destructive. She is left in the hands of the state, incarcerated.

This brings up another issue with the critical treatment of The Break. It has already been considered by reviewers as a whodunit mystery and a police procedural, which unfortunately takes the work completely out of context. It is, in fact, a powerful indictment of the real-life police investigation of crimes involving indigenous victims in Winnipeg, both female and male.

After the assault witnessed by Stella, the investigators are seen by her family as a further threat to their safety, rather than its saviours. And it is easy to understand why. Officer Scott, who is Métis, is eager to help but admits to himself at one point that all the women in the family he is trying to help look the same to him: “same long dark hair, straight and shiny, same almond eyes, almost.” His partner, Officer Christie, is a TV cop stereotype: gruff, doughnut loving and utterly racist. He openly acknowledges having no interest in serving and protecting these women, whom he calls “dime a dozen.” Even his expression is a cliché, but it is one drawn from reality.

In 2015, Maclean’s magazine placed Winnipeg at the heart of “Canada’s racism problem.” The story came out following the death of Tina Fontaine, whose body was discovered by police divers while searching for the body of Faron Hall, a Dakota man. Fontaine’s family expressed hope that her death might ignite greater interest in the thousands of unsolved cases of missing and murdered indigenous women and men.

This is a subject Katherena Vermette has direct experience with. When she was 14, her brother Donovan disappeared after a night out with friends. In North End Love Songs, Vermette addresses the attitudes held by the police who investigated the incident:

indians go missing
they tell the family
indians go missing
everyday
blue suits shrug
no sense looking
they said
he’ll turn up when
he gets bored
or broke

“They [the police] didn’t understand, or for whatever reason, it wasn’t relayed that he was a kid. My parents felt that my brother’s disappearance wasn’t taken seriously,” Vermette said, in a 2014 interview.

Six months after his disappearance, Donovan’s body was recovered in Lake Winnipeg. “We were broken,” Vermette said. “We never repaired from that fracture that happened. We had started the journey of my brother’s disappearance with a lot of energy and a lot of anger and a lot of frustration. That really drove us for a long time, trying to find answers. And then they never came. He was a good kid. And he should have been treated like one.”

This experience, as well as the death of Fontaine, prompted Vermette’s affiliation with Drag the Red, a group of Winnipeg volunteers who dredge the river in search of lost family members. Many of those they are looking for are the victims of cases the police consider closed. In 2016, working with an all-women crew, Vermette co-wrote and co-directed a short film about Drag the Red, called This River. In a scene from the film, she expresses her frustration with police apathy: “[They] won’t look unless they’re certain someone has gone in. They say it’s futile.” For the members of Drag the Red, pulling a dredge from the muddy waters with no idea what they will find, taking action is the only solution.

A generous storyteller, Ver­mette does not take it for granted that all readers will inherently understand how damaged the relationship between indigenous people and Canadian society has become. As readers, we can honour this generosity by not allowing ourselves to be lulled into a satisfying sense of camaraderie, having suffered alongside fictional characters. We can honour it by not repeating over and over how strong the women in this book are. It is true, they are strong. But let us not nod our heads in grim recognition of this strength, as if acknowledgement equals solidarity. Let us not pull our lips into thin lines and furrow our brows and express amazement at their resilience, as if its origin is a mystery. This makes it too easy to dismiss.

Let us look instead at the history behind the social malaise. Let us look at these characters as survivors and leaders within a damaged support structure, but not defined by it. And let us look at what is working: family, community, neighbourhood. People. As Stella’s Kookom says: “it means so much to have people. It is everything.” In The Break, we see the complex and occasionally pernicious nature of relationships, but we also see their undeniable beauty.